Gregory Till, PhD, MA, serves as Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Providence.
Gregory will serve on the pannel "How to Bake High-Performing Teams Into All Levels of the Organization" at Becker's Hospital Review 12th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place in Chicago from April 25-28, 2022.
To learn more about the conference and Gregory's session, click here.
Q: What are your top priorities for 2022?
Gregory Till: Our top priorities this year are related to inspiring our people, accelerating development, reducing our caregivers’ administrative burden, and transforming ourselves for the future. The first three are clear and immediate commitments to our current team who have been on the front lines of a global pandemic and a nation-wide workforce crisis for the last two years. 2022 must be “the year of the caregiver.” At Providence, we’re expanding access to wellbeing resources, tripling our investment in development, and implementing technology to ease our caregivers’ way.
In addition to our near-term commitments, we have an eye on the future. In this regard, we are actively preparing for the workforce we’ll need in 2030 when we’ll be increasingly practicing in new models and new places of care. This transformational strategy requires us to think about deconstructing and digitizing our work, deploying our workforce more effectively, and diversifying our sources of talent.
Q: How do you plan to pivot strategies this year to better serve patients?
GT: In order to serve patients more effectively, we need to make sure we are able to fully staff our care settings with highly engaged caregivers. That has become more difficult over the last year, as we we’ve seen burnout and attrition increasing at alarming rates across the industry.
At Providence, we’ve been adjusting in two ways. First, we’re reviewing every process and practice to ensure they’re designed to support our caregivers’ needs today and into the future. This includes reevaluating everything from our caregiver value proposition, to pay and benefits, to hiring and inclusion practices. Second, we are accelerating efforts aimed at simplifying our caregivers’ work and creating additional capacity. Our ultimate aims in this area are to reduce our caregivers’ administrative burden and better use technology to help us increase flexibility, predictability, and demand management.
Q: What technologies and innovations are you most excited about in healthcare right now?
GT: To support the strategies listed above, we’ve been partnering to create proprietary workforce technology, using advanced analytics. There are two examples I am especially excited about. We’re calling the first “predictive hiring.” This effort uses data to project patient demand and workforce availability, allowing us to create staffing models 3-6 months out. If we see gaps, we can post positions “ahead” of the need, reducing vacancy. The second is called “predictive scheduling.” Using some of the same data, along with our caregivers’ availability and shift preferences, this technology can create a unit schedule in seconds. Not only does this simplify a task for our supervisors, but it’s resulting in more efficient, more caregiver-centered schedules.
Q: What will the lasting legacy of COVID-19 be on the healthcare system?
GT: COVID has shined a spotlight on the healthcare industry, highlighting the best we have to offer and some of our biggest gaps. From a workforce perspective, the best came in the form of our caregivers. Their commitment, compassion, grit, and resilience deserve a tremendous amount of gratitude. Their sacrifices will be difficult to repay.
Some of the biggest gaps were also workforce related. While we’ve been working through talent challenges in healthcare for the last ten years, COVID accelerated the inevitable: a simultaneous decrease in healthcare talent and an increase in demand for healthcare services. This is a trend that will continue to get worse for the next several decades and demands immediate attention.
In this regard, COVID’s legacy may be that it provided the catalyst for major change—a workforce transformation. This transformation must include a reimagination of how and where we work, what constitutes jobs and workers, and how we integrate humans with machines. It should have us thinking about new partnerships, innovative ventures, and collective advocacy for what we need in the future vs. where we’ve been in the past. And, it should enhance the democratization of work, social responsibility, and equity.