Elevating Care and Engagement

Before the pandemic, health care organizations across the country were focused on hiring and retaining top talent in the clinical field, especially nurses. In our new normal, this focus has been exemplified and elevated to ensure caregivers have the tools and resources to care for others and themselves. 

To maintain our status as an industry leading care provider, we not only need qualified, compassionate caregivers, but we need to be highly competitive in our recruiting and retention efforts to attract and retain clinical experts. 

As a result, we sought input from our leaders and employees and re-evaluated our clinical and operational processes and procedures to uncover inefficiencies and new opportunities to support our clinicians. This important work helped us focus our efforts in strategic areas and guided us to look for alternative approaches to addressing after-hours clinical needs to alleviate this responsibility, while evaluating state and federal regulations in addition to ACHC accreditation standards. 

CommonSpirit Health at Home created a partnership to add clinical nursing triage after-hours for all home health locations across our organization. Working with IntellaTriage, our patients have direct access to nursing support after-hours and on the weekends and our clinicians are able to balance the demands of work and personal life by alleviating on-call requirements. 

Within the first year of our new after-hours structure, we have seen almost all of our home health and hospice quality indicators improve. In addition, the ease of use and extremely fast response times offered by our after-hours partner has contributed to a significant improvement in patient experience scores. 

This change, in addition to many of our other initiatives to support our team members, has enhanced our employee engagement -  resulting in a significant decrease in our turnover rates as our nurses see our active commitment to support them so they can provide the highest quality of care possible to our patients and value us as the employer of choice.

Within our second year we fully expect to see further improvements in our quality and patient experiences scores, in addition to engagement rates, which will set the foundation for us to leverage the employee experience from our clinical team members to positively impact our recruitment and retention initiatives. 

As an employer and provider of choice we are committed to learning from our internal experts to uncover new opportunities to transform the delivery of care for our clinicians and our patients. As our team continues to grow, so does the reach of our ministry to care for more patients in need, every minute of the day.