Staffing, turnover, and employee retention continue to be a significant challenge throughout the healthcare industry. Clients continue to share with us their frustrations on the inability to hire, train, and retain some of their key talent. A recent online open position search revealed the following nationwide job.
postings:
- Medical auditor:
900+ open positions - Credentialing:
3,000+ open positions - Certified coder:
3,000+ open positions - Managed care contracting:
2,400+ open positions
These job postings represent only a fraction of the critical open positions across the healthcare landscape. To further complicate matters, organizations are now recruiting candidates from across the country and establishing completely remote workforces for some positions. It may be time to review your recruiting and retention strategy to determine how best to fill open positions, identify the best talent, and maximize your return on investment.
Strategies to consider should include:
1. Potential co-sourcing or outsourcing of certain positions
In order to minimize your organization’s turnover, consider co-sourcing or fractional utilization of subject matter expertise. In some cases, it may be more cost effective to purchase professional services than it is to recruit, train, compensate, and retain in house talent.
For example, does your organization need a team of dedicated credentialing specialists to onboard your new providers and manage provider expirables? Might it also work to retain your best and brightest key players but supplement them with professional outsourced services when you need it?
2. Re-examine remote workforce efficacy
As it relates to coding positions, including chart auditing, these roles have increasingly transitioned to remote tasks in the last couple of years. Does your organization still maintain a positive return on investment in those positions? Has the transition to managing a remote workforce positively or negatively impacted the coding audit results and/or coding productivity? Did you overpay for the best resource only to discover they don’t produce in a remote/ virtual environment?\
3. Analyze the data and benchmarking
At Dean Dorton, clients routinely ask us to review department staffing and costs, productivity output, cost to collect, and other benchmarks. An independent perspective rooted in data and past experiences can help your organization identify potential improvement opportunities related to staffing, recruiting, and maximizing value in every position. How do you stack up to your competition and other professional service firms?
These critical steps to review your recruiting and retention policies take time and effort, but should not be overlooked, especially during this time of high employee turnover.