Taking Stock of the Healthcare Skill Gap—and How to Bridge It

By Matt Phillion

According to a study by GlobalData, 43% of healthcare professionals believe one of the primary challenges in the industry is a lack of specialized skills. Healthcare needs these new skills more than ever, with the emergence of new technology, such as AI, as a means to support care, as well as evolutions in how and where care is delivered outside the four walls of the hospital environment. Meanwhile, the rise of value-based care encourages the constant improvement with how care is provided.

How can healthcare address this skill gap and help organizations grow and scale with better training and education for healthcare professionals?

“There’s been so much change in healthcare in terms of reimbursement, increased utilization and higher acuity in patients, and the continued staffing shortages we’re seeing across the continuum of care,” says Lissy Hu, MD, CEO of Ascend Learning.

Hu discusses existing challenges often with different segments of the healthcare continuum, and the fact that this skill gap is something that comes up so often regardless of what part of the industry you are talking to is surprising.

“Providers and payors, hospitals, post-acute or community-based providers, very rarely do you hear the same challenges across all of these very different segments of the care continuum,” she says. “Usually, hospitals will be worried about one thing, home-based care about another, but in the past decade-plus it was really impactful to hear from hospitals all the way to nursing homes or home health that they have a challenge around workforce development, training, and recruitment and retention.”

Part of this is due to people living longer, and so there are more, varied chronic conditions to take care of, and the body of scientific knowledge continues to increase.

“The way we care for patients is evolving,” says Hu. “The reimbursement models are shifting and iterating, and that’s not a negative thing. As we think about how to deliver quality care with limited provider abrasion, there has to be a change. But all that change requires you to invest in your workforce. Ultimately, it’s the providers who provide care, and to get better patient outcomes you need to think of the provider and how you train and improve their work experience.”

The rapid advancement of technology is at the forefront of the skill gap as the industry evolves and develops new technology to solve problems and care for patients in new ways.

“As the GlobalData study notes, there’s a lack of specialized skills and talent. Part of that comes from how dynamic the change has been,” she says. “The emergence of new technology, AI being rapidly incorporated into technology from the EHR to other technical tools.”

While new technology requires education and training to keep up, where care is happening is also moving, and with it, providers need to broaden their skillset.

Lastly, the impact of value-based care and how it changes care delivery can’t be overlooked.

“Value-based care requires more of a teams-based approach, interacting with your patient in a more collaborative way, with more touch points and more coordination of skills,” says Hu.

This requires looking beyond just training and enhancement for doctors and nurses, she notes. Allied health professionals across the spectrum of care have an opportunity to improve their range of skill and training as well.

“New models of care, new ways of treating patients with higher acuity, and leveraging technology in the workplace, all of those things are being seen by providers,” says Hu. “It’s a challenging and exciting time when faced with all this change, making sure your workforce has the tools they need.”

Training is not one-and-done

Addressing the skill gap means addressing the concept of lifelong learning, Hu explains.

“What I hear from providers all the time is: training isn’t a one-and-done activity. You don’t graduate from nursing school or med school, do your onboarding and then training is done,” she says. “A lot of organizations are thinking about how we can continue to develop our workforce once they’re in their roles.”

Career laddering and professional development are important, Hu says.

“Large systems are using tools to help the workforce advance in their careers. If you’re a nurse who works in a general med-surg unit, how do you progress into a specialty, like oncology, for example? There are specialized skills for specific patient populations, and tools that can help standardize and make it easier for staff to know how to take the next step,” she says. “It’s a win-win for the organization who want to fill these specialized roles as well.”

Hu looks for ways software can be built to make it “easier to do the right thing,” she explains.

“Everybody has a lot going on, work and family and personal commitments, and it’s hard if you don’t have the tools that help you take the next step in your career,” she says. “Traditionally, you’re looking at what might be a specific set of requirements that change depending on the hospital, or even within the same health system. You’re trying to collect all these requirements, a certain number of procedures, a specific type of presentation at a conference, and collect all this information into a binder,” says Hu. “You hand it over to the nurse manager who may not have the level of time to help their own workforce in terms of advancing.”

With the right tool—Ascend recently acquired a system called StaffGarden to do just this—a manager can track where their team is in terms of advancing or collecting skills, and the worker can follow a systemized, standardized process for skill improvement. StaffGarden has helped over 800 hospitals resulting in a 52% improvement in retention for hospitals on a StaffGarden clinical ladder. They also have a 99.65% increase in clinical ladder engagement year over year.

The impact of value-based care

“A lot of providers will say, when they are preparing for a different value-based payment model, a big part of preparation is training—what they call physician transformation or clinical transformation,” says Hu. “It’s about teaching the workforce how to be successful in a value-based structure.”

Some of this is an increased focus on care coordination and preventive care. The coordination aspect stems from the teams-based approach of value-based care, requiring a more longitudinal view, interacting not only with the clinical team but with social work, case management, payors, behavioral health, all working toward a whole-person health view.

“These are just a few examples of how things change when care is being delivered in a value-based system, and all things you have to teach providers,” says Hu.

There’s so much technology and change in healthcare aimed at enabling providers, Hu says, whether it’s moving from paper to electronic processes or data collection or any other process improvement.

“For the providers themselves, there’s a human capital aspect of it: using technology to help providers be the best providers they can be, with the skills and knowledge they need and the practice patterns they need that goes beyond just getting information from one place to another,” says Hu. “We have to think about how tech enables providers in terms of workflows, efficiency opportunities as well as their learning, because healthcare continues to evolve so much.”

It’s a combination of both speed and enablement.

“A lot of enablement tech can remove or reduce the administrative burden on the provider, but then you’re freeing up time. So now providers can spend more time with the patients. You can then make sure they’re maximizing that time as part of the continued development of your workforce,” says Hu.

As technology advances, there will be more enabling tech that goes beyond just reducing administrative burden and helps with and augments clinical judgment, “but ultimately it’s the provider who provides care,” says Hu. “You need both: the technology that enables your workforce but also the development of that workforce.”

To address skill gaps, it’s worth looking at the whole learning arc holistically, says Hu.

“The cycle starts while they’re in school or certification programs. Today we have a lot of technology for educating people who are entering those careers, with tons of innovations for students and educators,” says Hu. “It’s great that we have such tools for the early part of the life cycle, and as we continue to develop our workforce how do we improve that process and make the most of those tools? We want to develop tools that help the workforce continue to develop end-to-end, starting from when they enter their careers all the way until retirement.”

Matt Phillion is a freelance writer covering healthcare, cybersecurity, and more. He can be reached at matthew.phillion@gmail.com.