By Jordann Donskey / Special to Healthcare Facilities Today

The healthcare industry has never been more tasked than it is today to provide practical, cost-effective healthcare solutions and patient care. Maintaining profitability and sustainability becomes additionally challenged by the unknowns in our political climate. Healthcare organizations need to locate and manage talent that will support their unique operational objectives and help them to remain compliant in our complex and changing world. The evolving healthcare industry and new trends are creating a fresh set of challenges for Human Resource departments. 

Affordable Care Act (ACA)

The Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare or the ACA) made sweeping changes in healthcare plans that affected insurance companies, covered persons, practitioners and employers. To accommodate the ACA, changes have been applied in systems across the board and education has taken place in an effort to keep up. But now, the entire system is in flux under the new Trump administration. Although the majority Republican congress and Trump White House initially spoke of scrapping the ACA all together, it appears that adaptations will be more likely. 

Without a clear sense of the changes coming about, human capital management system developers and administrators must remain on the alert. Pending changes by the Trump administration to the ACA could create as much upheaval as the initial passing of the ACA did. Human capital management providers that are flexible and on the cutting edge of tracking compliance changes will serve healthcare employers well during these uncertain times.

Talent shortages

Physician and nursing shortages continue to plague the healthcare industry as we have moved into 2017, as discussed in this article by Barton and Associates. Employers in the healthcare industry must refine their talent acquisition strategy to ensure their talent pool is providing every possibility to meet their needs. Changes in immigration policy add to the unknowns in determining the expected shortages with many medical and doctoral workers coming from different parts of the world.

Shortages are exacerbated by the increasing need for specialized skills in the healthcare and health and wellness industries. Locating talent with unique skill sets in a dwindling talent pool requires employers to rely on their human capital management solutions to capture skills while providing capabilities that encourage all of the recruiting methods available in the digital age.

Human capital management systems with strong recruiting functionality provides healthcare employers the ability to cast a wider net to locate the harder to reach talent and spark interest. It allows increased opportunities for job seekers to find the organizations seeking their skillset. Engaging these candidates with an easy to use job board and streamlined application and screening process will help move prospective candidates through the process and quickly and efficiently transforms them into applicants.  It’s more important than ever to move healthcare candidates through the interview process, collect feedback and have the ability to make an offer before they are lost to another organization.

Human capital management solutions with fully loaded online recruiting functionality provides the convenience these candidates demand as well as the efficiency necessary to capture them. Look for integrated systems that allow your data gathered from recruiting to pass right through to the onboarding module. If the recruiting and onboarding systems are integrated, data will only have to be entered once, eliminating errors and duplicate work. Leveraging the latest in digital technology allows healthcare and health and wellness organizations to have a fighting chance in hiring the best talent before their competition does.

Increased technology

The healthcare industry has an increased demand to make all patient care records electronic while keeping them secure and in compliance with HIPAA standards.  Therefore, healthcare and health and wellness organizations require top IT talent. The systems the healthcare industry have in place are increasingly leading edge and in the forefront of technology. Healthcare organizations demand that their human capital management systems keep up with their existing systems in being the latest that technology has to offer, as well as the most secure.

Human capital management for the healthcare world must keep up with the expectation of excellence that patients and healthcare providers demand. Providers that can offer innovation, data analytics capabilities and an intuitive user experience will serve the needs best for tomorrow’s healthcare organizations.

Compliance

Healthcare organizations are at increased risk for litigation and privacy pitfalls, being stewards of sensitive patient information and claims data. Their human resource software solutions must support a workforce that demands increased scrutiny of their employee behavior. Their human capital management should have the ability to track training in ethics, security and privacy. Tracking of performance issues or protentional policy violations is even more critical in healthcare organizations that rely on the trust of their clients to remain in compliance as well as to remain competitive.

Reporting

Healthcare organizations require that their HR solutions provide value beyond paying their employees and tracking their insurance coverage and paid time off. Compiling and reporting on metrics such as productivity, employee retention, training and employee satisfaction are all expectations we will see into the future. Human capital management solutions must be able to provide the ability to quantify employee production and efficiency, tracking goals and measuring progress toward organizational objectives.  

Jordann Donskey is a senior marketer at EPAY Systems.