The healthcare industry is quickly becoming the largest employment sector in the U.S. economy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The five fastest growing industries for employment in the nation are all healthcare industries. And the two fastest growing occupational groups are healthcare practitioners and healthcare support.
But there's one thing that the healthcare industry is producing faster than job hires. And that is job openings. The gap of unfilled jobs in healthcare is growing rapidly.
Shortages of physicians, nurses and allied healthcare professionals plague healthcare providers, who cannot find enough quality clinicians to fill their job openings. This problem is getting worse, not better, as each month brings a continued rise in demand for healthcare services while the cumulative total of unfilled jobs continues to accrue.
The solution to this growing crisis is healthcare workforce optimization. Healthcare providers need to make the best and wisest use of the core and contingent staff that they already have. Expert staffing is vital, but it won't be enough to solve our nation's healthcare workforce challenges.
Code Blue: Healthcare Job Hires vs. Openings
A few months after the hard launch of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in January 2014, when millions of people who signed up for Obamacare could first use their health insurance, AMN Healthcare saw a spike in orders for contingent nurses. That spike has continued, slowing down and speeding up as months went by, but with a constant upward trajectory. And pretty soon, we saw demand for therapists, technicians and technologists also rise. Demand for physicians has been high for years.
The cause of rising demand is not only the ACA, but also an improving economy adding jobs, which means more people have employer-sponsored healthcare and money for copays and deductibles. At the same time, our population is aging, and older people use considerably more healthcare services compared to the general population. Not only is the patient population aging, but so is the healthcare workforce, which is leading to a wave of retirements and older clinicians opting for part-time work.
Some of the most troubling data for the healthcare industry comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey, which clearly shows the widening gap of unfilled healthcare jobs. While the number of healthcare job hires each month has continued at a steady pace, the number of healthcare job openings has steadily risen.
Two years ago, approximately 30% of healthcare jobs across the nation went unfilled. In 2016, according to the BLS, the percentage of unfilled healthcare job openings rose to 50%. Today, there are about a half million unfilled jobs in healthcare.
This is the widest gap that we've ever seen as long as the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been tracking these statistics, and it's been going up very steadily since the recession. We don't see these trends changing significantly. And even if there were some narrowing of this unfilled jobs gap, it wouldn't change the basic problem – too much demand and not enough supply. The growth of unfilled jobs is cumulative month after month, and the inventory just isn't there to fill demand.
This problem will continue. Between 2014-2024, the number of jobs for registered nurses is projected to grow by 16%, health technicians and technologists also by 16%, physical therapists by 34%, physicians and surgeons by 14% and nurse practitioners by 35%. While some professions, such as nursing, are producing more graduates, the number of new grads don't appear to be reaching the level of demand. But there is another problem. Through retirements and other employment changes, healthcare providers are losing experienced, specialty nurses and other practitioners. New grads cannot adequately fill these roles.
Optimize Staffing through Healthcare Workforce Solutions
To combat the gap of unfilled jobs at the enterprise- and unit-level, healthcare providers first must engage in 21st century sourcing, the modern process of finding the right nurses, physicians and allied professionals. Today, advertisements on a job board and a few phone calls won't do the job. An advanced system for sourcing healthcare talent is required. This includes reaching, engaging and activating practitioners through the most cutting-edge technological tools available. Outreach is achieved through the widest possible digital footprint for candidate supply, engagement through the largest clinical database, and activation with an expert recruitment team – all of which is driven by the engine of candidate insight and analytics.
While advanced sourcing capacity is necessary to hire the best healthcare professionals, it will not be enough by itself because of persistent workforce shortages. So, healthcare enterprises need workforce solutions to optimize their staffs and the patient care that they provide. Workforce solutions are a variety of innovative management and administrative processes that reduce complexity and increase efficiency related to the healthcare workforce through streamlining, automating, applying expertise, implementing technology, and educating and training for clinical role transitions. The object is to simplify the back-end of healthcare delivery so healthcare organizations can focus their attention on patient care.
Effective workforce solutions for staff optimization include:
Predictive Analytics – The most innovative way to optimize the healthcare workforce is to know what patient demand will be in the future and then to strategically plan staffing accordingly. Most clinical managers do not know that technology-enabled solutions to achieve this feat are available right now through predictive analytics and advanced labor management. Other industries depend on predictive analytics for management of resources and inventory. In healthcare today, these advanced processes driven by big data and algorithms are available to forecast patient demand up to 120 days in advance and strategically plan scheduling and staffing of clinical workforce.
Managed Services Programs (MSP) – MSPs, which are growing rapidly in the healthcare industry, streamline the entire workforce planning process by providing a single point of contact and management of all workforce vendors, agencies and contracts. The MSP conducts all workforce processes for contingent labor, including billing, timekeeping, housing and reporting. A staffing-based MSP also provides expert sourcing and recruiting of highly qualified clinical staff. The result is improved candidate quality and fill rates for vacancies, reduced overtime and effective use of contingent clinical staff.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) – Teams of expert healthcare recruiters optimize the recruitment process utilizing sourcing technology, best practices and reporting metrics, reducing vacancies, bad hires and lost candidates while improving time-to-fill, retention and staff satisfaction. Expert recruiters find candidates who are the best fit for the provider. RPO provides better and larger-scale sourcing than most healthcare enterprises can achieve, delivering overall improvement of clinical staff.
Vendor Management Systems (VMS) – Customizable technology is available to automate the administration of recruitment, credentialing, compliance, invoicing, billing, time-keeping and other tasks related to the procurement of nursing, allied, locums, IT and non-clinical professionals. A single VMS system can handle a wide variety of management tasks that are usually accomplished manually. The result is increased efficiency of staff utilization and quality of care, along with reduced costs.
Executive Leadership Search – In today's highly competitive and increasingly complex healthcare environment, a vacancy in a healthcare organization's leadership can seriously impact quality, revenue and strategy. Expert services for permanent and interim placement of key administrative and clinical leaders have become a vital part of workforce optimization by ensuring that leadership openings do not remain vacant and that they are filled by quality leaders who match organizational culture.
The Way Forward in an Era of Workforce Shortages
The growing shortages of nurses, physicians and allied healthcare professionals are in turn creating immediate problems on the clinical unit- and enterprise-levels throughout our nation's healthcare system. These problems include critical staff shortages, imbalances of specialty clinicians and of experience-to-novice staffing ratios, increased overtime, rising incentives for shift differentials, open shifts and problematic shifts, over-dependence on contingent labor and other issues. These problems can result in sinking staff morale, rising staff turnover, reductions in productivity, threats to patient-care quality, worsened patient satisfaction and overspending on labor budgets.
At the same time, healthcare is moving from volume to value in reimbursements for patient care, and our population is getting older, necessitating new emphasis on team-based care, chronic care, home health, and other outpatient care delivery. These issues require significant changes in workforce deployment.
In order to cope with the dramatic changes, healthcare organizations will find that they must optimize their existing workforce so that they can utilize their clinical and nonclinical staff in the best way for quality, efficiency and enterprise success. Many strategies in workforce optimization are now available, and healthcare organizations are finding that they must engage them in order to succeed in today's superheated industry.
READ MORE:
Healthcare Workforce Solutions: Purchase Order that Solves Staffing Problems
Progressive Solutions for Filling Healthcare Jobs
Get the Right Healthcare Staffing Mix through Analytics
21st Century Sourcing: Solving the Healthcare Supply-Demand Crunch
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