Investing in the workforce of tomorrow is crucial for any health system — and Houston-based Memorial Hermann Health System’s investment strategy has one focus: value.
At its core, this approach centers on the quintuple aims of driving value in healthcare — delivering the greatest outcomes, the lowest possible cost, the best experience for patients and consumers, the best experience for employees, and aggressively addressing health equity issues in the community.
“As we think about that, how do we make sure we have the right workforce to do that?” David Callender, MD, president and CEO of Memorial Hermann, told Becker’s. “To make those things happen. A workforce that is very much engaged by the work that we’re doing and feels that they’re a part of our achievement of success over the course of time. So, everything we do with regard to the workforce is driven by that strategic focus on value.”
Memorial Hermann has 34,000 employees and 6,700 affiliated physicians spanning greater Houston. To support workers, the health system offers various initiatives, including a program to facilitate multiple career pathways for employees, and another that provides peer-to-peer recognition, virtual badges, points-based rewards and enhanced service anniversary gifts.
Memorial Hermann also launched the Health Education and Learning High School last fall, a partnership between the health system and Aldine Independent School District.
To ensure initiatives like these stay effective and scalable across such a large, diverse workforce, the health system considers several key objectives with developing its human capital strategy.
“We’re trying to do so, obviously thinking about our culture, the experience of our employees,” Dr. Callender said. “That’s very well described by our values — community, compassion, courage and credibility. And we roll that up, along with our service and service standards, to create what we call the ‘deep trust, high expectations’ model of leadership and performance.”
“And so this whole thought of, what culture do we create that creates that supportive backdrop, so that our employees feel like they can be individually successful while we’re being successful as a group, is a major objective.”
The second objective is talent development.
“It’s not enough just to hire really great people. We want to make sure that they have an opportunity to grow and develop, but we want to make sure that we’re supporting the growth and development that our organization needs so that we can continue to pursue this concept of value creation,” said Dr. Callender.
Lastly, Memorial Hermann considers the overall strategic capability for the organization.
“What’s the composition of our workforce now and in the future?,” Dr. Callender said. “How do we best manage productivity, using all the different tools and employee types that are out there? How do we expect that to change over the course of time?”
“So thinking beyond the current ability to create value — what it looks like in the future as healthcare changes — is another important objective for us.”
Dr. Callender said the measurement of Memorial Hermann’s success is driven by culture and engagement metrics. Essentially, how employees are feeling about their work environment and how managers feel about developing talent.
“Do they feel they’re well equipped? Do we have the right support mechanisms in place? Are we providing the right sort of forums and tool sets for us to discuss talent development? — where we are and how we create the optimal set of opportunities for our employees to advance their skills, their knowledge and their experience?” he said.
“And then finally, strategic capability. That’s something that our senior leaders and our executives across the organization think about a lot — what does value creation look like today?”
Across those three key drivers, the health system uses various metrics to assess how it is meeting long-term goals.
As systems continue to think about their workforce development model, Dr. Callender noted that strategy will be different at each organization.
Yet, “what we all basically agree to is that we can’t rely on the traditional pipelines for workforce and think that we’re going to be successful in the future,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we’re moving away from them. But we all agree that we need to innovate. We need to do more on the front end of developing new approaches to recruiting people, engaging them to work in healthcare.”
He added that was what drove Memorial Hermann to develop the HEAL high school, to engage young people in new ways and cultivate their interest in a healthcare profession.
“Helping new hires with career development — for example, a lot of our programs [recruit] people into entry-level positions on the inpatient side as patient care technicians, offering them a variety of forms of support to go on to develop a pathway to an LVN, or maybe on to an associate degree in nursing, or even a BSN, and then providing resources along the way — the support that’s necessary to get there,” he said.
In thinking about what Memorial Hermann can do to broaden the usual pipelines to fill its workforce gaps now and in the future, Dr. Callender noted, “Innovation is key.”
