The Global Workforce Intelligence Project: The Cure for the Healthcare Crisis

We are no longer going to be able to provide care for our communities if we don’t think differently.

Greg Till, Chief People Officer, Providence

We just finished a year-long study of the healthcare industry of our Global Workforce Intelligence Project , and the results will blow your mind.

Why did we focus on healthcare? Healthcare is the largest industry in the US, with about 1 in 7 people working in the industry (20 million, or more than twice the population of my home country Austria).

Industry convergence is a reality: Amazon's recent acquisition of One Medical (and shut down of Amazon Health) shows that technology giants are trying yet again to enter the complex space. CVS is buying Signify, a home health care provider, and Walmart and Target are increasingly entering the primary care space.

The industry is also more complex than any other. Think about the business, talent, and technology challenges in your industry, and then add daily life-and-death scenarios, the need to constantly train the workforce for new care protocols and medications, and the inability to offer schedule and location flexibility. That's what being a healthcare executive is about.

A Massive Nursing Gap of 2.1 Million People

At the heart of this industry are clinicians, and especially nursing professionals. Using time-series data from the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform on millions of publicly available healthcare worker profiles to predict the future, we found that nursing jobs are growing at 14% over the next 2-3 years. And at any moment, there are around 700-750k nursing jobs open. Where will this go?

By 2025, we will be a mind-blowing 2.1 million nursing professionals short.

What's fascinating about this is the way we quantified the nursing shortage. We explain it in detail in our study - and you can do the same for your workforce. Whether it's a capacity or skills gap, you can predict the size of the problem in order to take the right action.

This gap may seem overwhelming, and many healthcare CHROs we talked with told us they were at their wits' end. "Who is going to care for you if we don't have enough nurses? It's not just a healthcare industry crisis. This impacts everyone", an executive said.

Can Healthcare Fill This Gap?

Healthcare organizations are innovating rapidly - because they have to. In fact, healthcare CHROs are thinking more like COOs and CIOs, innovating more than any other industries. Stand-alone siloed people practices no longer work. Instead, a new systemic approach is needed.

Recruit. Using talent intelligence, increase geographic reach, rebalance locations, increase diversity of talent to broaden the pool, predict upcoming retirement, and hire proactively.

Retain. Identify how to retain nurses in the workforce, stopping the drain out of the industry by supporting better work-life balance, increased staffing, more flexibility, better compensation, and an irresistible employee experience.

Reskill. Hire for potential, create career pathways from other professions into nursing, support clinicals during work hours, and pay for nurses during their education.

Redesign. Change roles and work to allow nurses to operate “top of license,”—a concept that indicates a nurse works at the top of their capabilities most of the time, introduce team-based care models, drive clinical transformation, and use automation and augmentation.

All of these need to be done together and done well. Organizations like AdventHealth, Bon Secours Mercy, HCA, Mercy Health, NewYork Presbyterian, and Providence innovate at scale across all these practices (and we highlight them in our research).

The Biggest Opportunity: Work Redesign

But will these innovations be enough? Can healthcare hire their way out of this crisis? The answer is no. There are simply not enough people out there to recruit, retain, or reskill into nursing roles.

Any way you cut the problem, there are simply not enough people out there to recruit, retain, or reskill. The hidden cure to the nursing crisis lies in the agile, rapid redesign of work, jobs, and employment models.

Instead of focusing on increasing supply of nurses, healthcare organizations need to double down on decreasing the demand for these workers by redesigning work.

Is Healthcare Ready?

Now, will healthcare be able to do this? How many organizations are actually ready for this? Based on our studies with thousands of companies, we know what works in the 4Rs and can identify strengths and opportunity areas.

While healthcare excels in recruiting, and is on par with the market in redesigning work and organizational models, the industry lags slightly in creating irresistible experiences, and limps behind in careers, growth, and reskilling.

How Advanced Organizations Approach the Challenge

About 10-15% of healthcare organizations are doing much of this already. What do these organizations do differently?

When we compared the skills and roles in these companies with the rest of the industry, the results were mind blowing: not only do these companies have more technology skills and roles, but they also invest heavily in transformation capabilities. On the flipside, they need less operations or administrative roles - and they also need 20% fewer nurses.

Getting Started

Our study is full of actionable steps and 12 specific practices along the 4R Framework proven to work in the most innovative organizations. How do you get started?

First, don't try to go it alone in HR. The systemic nature and interconnectedness of the nursing gap requires collaboration across the C-suite to solve this massive problem.

Second, use talent intelligence for your own company to understand what roles are declining and rising, predict the future based on trends, identify skills adjacencies, and determine solutions along the 4Rs.

Third, assess your organization's strengths and opportunities across the 4Rs, benchmark your recruiting, retention, reskilling, and redesign capabilities, and bolster weak spots.

Why This Matters in Any Industry

The insights are groundbreaking for any industry. We'll show you how to systemically define, quantify, and address your biggest talent problem, today and into the future, centered on making work irresistible for your employees.

Where to Go Next

Download the complementary?infographic and listen to the podcast .

Contact us ?to become a?JBC Member ?to access our healthcare industry collection, with access to an article from Josh, a podcast from Josh and me, the full?67-page industry study Healthcare at a Crossroads: Solving the Urgent Talent Gap in Clinical Care, in-depth case studies from AdventHealth, Bon Secours Mercy, Mercy Health, and Providence, a report diving into HR transformation in healthcare, and more.

We have hundreds of resources, reports, tools and diagnostics on Talent Acquisition, Employee Experience, L&D, and Organization Design, and many other topics of HR and Talent.

Participate in the?Global Workforce Intelligence Project ?to learn more about talent intelligence.