How to Use Healthcare Onboarding Software to Accelerate Staff Readiness

With the right healthcare onboarding software you can get your staff in the field faster, improve the quality of their training, and minimize training costs.

When it comes to staff readiness and happier, more productive employees, a good onboarding program, supported by a robust software solution, is key. In fact, organizations with a strong onboarding process improve productivity by over 70 percent as well as new hire retention by 82 percent, according to one study.

But for many healthcare organizations, current onboarding programs leave employees unprepared, take as long as a year for full productivity ramp-up, or are expensive to implement—as much as $30,000 per employee.

By leveraging the right onboarding software, you can create a comprehensive onboarding program without sacrificing time. Here’s a three-pronged strategy for streamlining, expediting, and improving your onboarding without financial strain.

Automate Onboarding & Training Across Your Organization with Software

Save time and improve the quality of your training by automating your onboarding process and incorporating high-quality multimedia content.

• Use a learning management system to create, assign, and track multiple onboarding programs and employee progress across your organization.
• Leverage effective video content that allows new hires to achieve competency benchmarks on the first try, saving valuable preceptor time.

Create Standardized Training and Onboarding Tracks

When training protocols vary widely across an organization, confusion, clinical errors, and low morale can result. Make it easier to deliver effective training and improve the quality, consistency, and efficiency of your onboarding by standardizing your training using templates and evidence-based courses.

• Develop standardized digital care pathways using patient engagement solutions, and train staff on each care pathway.
• Empower new hires to do their best work by standardizing onboarding programs for each role across your organization.
• Protect your organization by standardizing documentation and compliance training across all teams.

Familiarize New Hires with Company Culture

Automating your onboarding certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t personalize it. Ensure that your onboarding program gets results by tailoring it to your organization and individual roles.

Cultural fit is a primary factor in whether new hires will succeed, so it’s important to help employees understand their new work environment during the onboarding process. Help instill alignment and long-term retention by being transparent about your company’s mission, vision, and core values, and explicit about key expectations, standards, and protocols.

Improve employee satisfaction and decrease training time by creating personalized onboarding tracks based on need and skills by:

• Identifying the most important skills for each role you’re hiring for, then measuring the competency of your new hires with skills assessments during the onboarding process.
• Using the information you gather to create targeted education programs that strengthen areas of clinical weakness or allow more experienced clinicians to learn at the right level.

Getting to the Root of Staffing and Productivity Challenges

In the 2019 State of Home Health Care Staffing Report from Home Health Care News, more than 95 percent of respondents said that staffing challenges were somewhat or very impactful on business growth. During this challenging time, it’s even more important to boost staff retention while conserving resources. One of the best ways to do that is by creating an efficient, streamlined onboarding program that gets employees into the field as quickly as possible with the training they need to succeed.