Partner Solutions Blog
Employer Solutions
6 Healthcare Staffing Benchmarks & Metrics to Know
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial for healthcare organizations looking to enhance patient care and operational efficiency through data-driven decision-making. Instead of relying on intuition or “best guesses,” healthcare leaders can leverage these benchmarks to address staffing challenges, optimize resources and ensure the long-term well-being of their organizations.
Here are a few essential healthcare staffing metrics that every organization should closely monitor to succeed in this field.
Do You Know About These Healthcare Staffing Innovations?
The healthcare sector faces an unprecedented demand for skilled labor, with a global shortage of 18 million healthcare workers by 2030. With changing patient needs and a rapidly evolving health tech landscape, major transformations are already happening in the healthcare industry.
Luckily, healthcare staffing innovations are arising to mitigate the critical problem of acquiring and retaining personnel. Check out these advancements that don’t just fill gaps but also improve how you operate, ensuring that the right talent is in the right place.
How to Upskill Your Employees: The Quick Guide
Having competent staff members is essential to your organization’s success. However, as technology advances and priorities evolve, you may struggle to stay ahead of the curve. Upskilling your employees is an excellent way to maintain top performance while promoting career growth in the modern workspace.
Upskilling involves teaching current employees new skills or improving their existing ones to enhance their productivity. Investing in employee development as an HR executive can foster innovation, improve job satisfaction and prepare your workforce for future challenges. Here are practical strategies on how to upskill employees.
Academic Solutions
What is Credit for Prior Learning? A Guide for Academic Leaders
With higher education enrollment on the decline, identifying learners with skills gained through alternative education opportunities, work or community-based experiences can be a game changer for educational institutions, like yours.
Credit for Prior Learning allows you, as an academic leader, to provide students academic recognition regardless of informal or formal education. Here is a look at what credit for prior learning is, its benefits and how to set up your own program by partnering with MedCerts.
Increase Graduation Rates Through Course Content Innovation
When students are engaged in learning, they become active participants in their education. This active participation helps boost their success and lead to better outcomes upon graduation. To achieve these goals and increase graduation rates, educational institutions should consider course content innovation. Innovating coursework lets you attract more students, boost year-over-year enrollment and help students become ready for the real world.
Incorporating Virtual Task-Based Learning Into Your Programs
The online virtual learning environment revolution is here to stay. It is increasingly becoming a popular alternative to the conventional physical classroom experience. Also known as eLearning, this approach refers to an innovative form of education that predominantly takes place in an online environment. Educators and learners get to interact remotely using digital platforms, materials and tools instead of physically meeting up.
In the trending virtual task-based learning, learners engage in practical, task-oriented activities. If you’re an educator or program developer, this approach helps you leverage the flexibility and accessibility of eLearning environments. Here is an in-depth look at the benefits of virtual task-based learning and tips on how you can integrate it into your program, leveraging platforms like MedCerts
Workforce Solutions
Meeting WIOA Clients In-Person vs. Online
In today’s tech-forward world, virtual meetings are here to stay. We can join conferences, catch up with friends or even earn career credentials from the comfort of our homes — or anywhere else we happen to be.
Online check-ins can help your clients stay connected with their workforce program, but there are some drawbacks to be prepared for. If you’re deciding between in-person vs online meetings for your clients, here’s what you need to know.
5 Tips to Increase Your Client’s Course Completion Rate
In theory, you can learn anything online for free or at an extremely low cost. Many of the most prestigious colleges in the US post their lectures and coursework online for free. Unfortunately, the completion rate of these courses is dismal. These massive open online courses (MOOCs) have a completion rate — the percentage of students who complete the course — of three to six percent. If students aren’t completing the course, they can’t benefit from them.
You can help your clients beat the odds and finish their online job training programs by setting them up for success from the beginning. Here are five tips for how to increase course completion rates for your clients.
Understanding Connectivism Learning Theory to Better Help Clients
Your clients can learn almost anything they want directly from their phone with a quick internet search. In today’s world, finding information isn’t an impediment to learning. What people need is connection. According to the Connectivism Learning Theory, true learning is a process of connecting diverse ideas and people in multiple ways. By drawing on elements from Connectivism, you can help your students build a network and be more successful in their educational journey.
MedCerts Program Solutions
Partnering to Address Dental Assistant Demand
It’s the question every dental practice is wondering: where are all the dental assistants?
According to Jennifer Zabel, a senior allied health program director with MedCerts, the biggest challenge affecting the dental assistant profession is the labor shortage. Scores of assistants left dentistry during COVID closures, which only compounded existing labor shortages caused by burnout, turnover, retirements, and a host of other life issues that cause people to leave healthcare jobs.
Dental assistants are essential and highly visible members of the dental practice. They provide a variety of services: greeting and scheduling patients, taking x-rays, keeping records, and assisting dentists and dental hygienists throughout the appointment. In addition, they pour dental models, help to fabricate temporary crowns, assist with the application of sealant, fluoride and topical anesthetics, and provide aftercare instructions. Dental practices frankly cannot do without them.
Of the one million people who work in dentists’ offices, more than a third are dental assistants. Today, the nation has some 370,000 assistants and, each year, dental offices need about 64,000 new and replacement dental assistants. Over the next 10 years, growth is projected to be about 10%.
The need for dental assistants, in other words, is not going away. If something is to be done about the labor shortage, it must be now.
How to Help a New Generation of Talent Get Started as Surgical Techs
The labor shortage in the US is legendarily widespread. In healthcare, it is critical. But for surgical tech jobs in particular, it is shutting down operating rooms, limiting the number of surgeries, and affecting the quality of patient care.
Today, there are thousands of openings for surgical techs across hospitals and surgery centers, and it is increasingly difficult to find people to fill this important entry-level healthcare position. According to the BLS, more than 120,000 people currently work as surgical technologists and the field is projected to grow by 6% over the next decade. Between new and replacement jobs created by churn, healthcare providers need to hire about 10,000 surgical techs per year. Not to mention, vacancies can take up to a year to fill. That’s a long time for a hospital to go without the critical personnel who gather all the necessary equipment ahead of time, hand instruments to the surgeon, and even hold organs in place during surgery.
To help solve this labor crisis, MedCerts has designed a best-in-class surgical technologist certificate to support colleges and healthcare providers looking for a more accessible, affordable, and reliable way to get qualified surgical techs into the workforce.
Pharmacy Tech Training Partnerships To Alleviate Pharmacy Labor Shortages
There is a large shortage of pharmacy techs. According to a 2022 survey conducted by the National Community Pharmacists Association,more than 75% of pharmacies are having a hard time finding pharmacy technicians: the critical workers who work under the supervision of a pharmacist and who do everything from filling prescriptions to answering the phone. The shortage of technicians is so bad that nearly nine out of 10 hospitals and pharmacy administrators are forced to tap their pharmacists to fill in for technicians.
The pharmacy technician profession has grown by 7% since 2017 and is projected to grow by another 7% over the next 10 years. Today, more than 450,000 people work as pharmacy techs, and there have been 12,000 job postings, on average, per month for the past two years. All of this is to say, our nation really needs more pharmacy techs!
So the question is, how can we get more people to pursue this super in-demand occupation?
First, to get more candidates, hospitals and pharmacies may be forced to increase compensation. Simple supply and demand tells us that as pharmacies pay more, they will see more candidates.
But wages alone won’t solve all of our problems here. Why? You can’t pay people who simply aren’t there. Even as salaries rise, we will continue to face a dearth of pharmacy techs because of the intense labor shortage, which is driven by low birth rates, low labor force participation rates amongst working-age people, and wave upon wave of retirements as baby boomers leave the labor market. This triple whammy is hitting the healthcare sector hard, so we need to turn our attention to another key issue if we want to address the lack of pharmacy techs.
The real solution rests in our ability to educate and train a new generation of talent. This is where MedCerts’ RX-3000 Program can really help. With this new program, pharmacies, hospitals, and postsecondary healthcare programs are able to create new talent in a very time-sensitive, cost-effective way.
Apprenticeships
Building the Future Allied Health Workforce with Apprenticeships
As people seek better ways to enter or move around within the labor market, there’s no question that an increasingly mainstream approach has been apprenticeships. According to the Department of Labor, nearly 610,000 Americans are currently working as apprentices, a 106% increase since 2013. Given the high cost of postsecondary education, the need to hire quickly, and the relaxing of degree requirements, apprenticeships have become an appealing and effective alternative to college.
Healthcare Apprenticeships Offer Northwest Illinois a Solution to Shortages
In the world of healthcare, apprenticeships are relatively new and rare. But Karen Kryder, the innovative learning team leader for FHN—a non-profit regional healthcare system with 17 locations across five counties in Northwest Illinois—is working to change that.
Henry Ford Health Uses the Apprenticeship Model to Attract and Develop Talent
Takeaways:
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Factors like the cost of education, low replacement rates, compensation, retirements and an aging population have made hiring healthcare workers extremely difficult.
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According to Catherine Susko, director of talent solutions for Henry Ford Health, the best way to resolve labor shortage challenges is to “create opportunities for development and advancement.”
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The 107-year-old healthcare provider must find new ways to staff up if it wants to continue to provide much-needed services to the surrounding community.
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The apprenticeship model is ideal for HFH because it “helps people who would not otherwise know about opportunities in healthcare to learn and pursue these jobs.”
News & Notes
MedCerts Launches Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) eLearning Program Benefiting Medical Providers, Patients and Aspiring Healthcare Professionals
LIVONIA, Mich., Sept. 23, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Offering a vital solution for healthcare providers requiring more trained personnel and patients in need of qualified care, MedCerts today announced the launch of its Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) eLearning program. The multi-week immersive course features generative and conversational AI, pioneered by MedCerts, establishing a new benchmark in healthcare training while addressing urgent staffing needs. MedCerts is known for its innovation in online career training in allied healthcare and information technology programs.
MedCerts and Albion College Join Forces to Expand Clinical Training for Students, Offering Accelerated Pathways to Careers in Healthcare
ALBION, Mich., Sept. 12, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — MedCerts, a leading provider of online healthcare and IT career training, is proud to announce an exciting new partnership with Albion College, a renowned liberal arts institution. This collaboration will provide undergraduate students at Albion’s Lisa and James Wilson Institute for Medicine with access to comprehensive short-term, online certification training, allowing them to develop essential skills and better prepare them for employment in clinical roles in hospitals and clinics across the nation. The Wilson Institute will now offer students an accelerated pathway to in-demand healthcare careers by providing entry-level certifications in programs, such as Patient Care Technician, to more advanced specializations, including Surgical Technologist.
College of Professional Studies at Syracuse University and MedCerts Collaborate to Offer Innovative Education and Career Development Opportunities
SYRACUSE, N.Y., Sept. 09, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The College of Professional Studies at Syracuse University and MedCerts proudly announce a new partnership focused on delivering innovative, accessible learning opportunities. Together, they will introduce specialized programs in the healthcare and information technology spaces tailored to meet the demands of today’s workforce.
