Three external staff management challenges in healthcare

Managing the skills and capabilities of third parties who work in large healthcare organisations can be challenging, but extended enterprise software can help manage learning and training opportunities, writes Carmelo Mallamace.

For healthcare organisations, keeping the workforce skilled and up to date with new systems, regulations and changing technology can be a challenge. But, it’s not just their own workforce they need to worry about: it is just as important to keep their extended team – staff at third-party providers, contractors, and vendors – compliant, which is crucial to ensuring efficiency, profitability and delivery of high-quality, patient-centered care.

We often see three challenges of external partner management in healthcare organisations. Here, we outline what they are and how to solve them.

1. Ensuring all partners are trained to provide consistent, high-quality care

Delivering, managing and reporting on training can be difficult to coordinate and track across large organisations. Face-to-face training often isn’t scalable and pulls staff away from patients or performing other critical functions, but workers must still be adept in organisational processes, systems usage and best practice.

Extended enterprise learning management solutions provide training and development tools to employees across an entire network, including third-party vendors and contractors. Courses and access can be targeted to specific audiences, while HR and L&D teams can easily get an overview of compliance and certification statuses.

2. Healthcare professionals need ongoing development

Not only does continuous education and learning help ensure quality patient care, it also is a key component in retaining employees and staff in the extended provider network. Nurses say that ongoing education is a key factor in their decision to stay with an organisation – and continuing professional development also necessary for them to remain practising in the UK – but the onus for organising this training often falls on swamped HR and L&D departments.

Organisations can publish, manage and track learning curriculums with extended enterprise solutions. Certification management tools enable custom certifications, forms and reports to be created. They also have configurable workflows to allow organisations to offer hundreds of courses, without spending hundreds of hours administering them.

3. Keeping patients engaged with their own care

Patient education is critical to reducing unnecessary visits. By leveraging an extended enterprise platform, healthcare providers can offer branded learning opportunities to patients to improve care and strengthen ties to the community. Courses can focus on chronic condition managment, pre- and post-op care, daily nutrition, exercise, or lifestyle management, for example. Built-in e-commerce tools enable organisations to offer these courses for free or for a fee.

Cornerstone’s Extended Enterprise solution helps healthcare organisations solve these challenges. It enables organisations to easily offer training, certification and collaboration opportunties to community healthcare teams and patients.