MedBridge Roundtable: Insights and Strategies from Organizations Using MedBridge Skills & Competency Manager

Across the healthcare industry, staff shortages are requiring many organizations to increase hiring, improve the onboarding process, find ways to boost staff retention, and ensure that new clinicians can administer care safely—all while keeping costs down.

The answer to these challenges for a growing number of organizations is skills and competency management, an effective onboarding process that allows organizations to identify and train the critical skills necessary for an employee to reach competency in their role.

Released this year, the MedBridge Skills & Competency Manager helps healthcare organizations streamline the onboarding and preceptor process, train new nurses on clinical and non-clinical skills so they can start providing patient care faster, and document and report on training and skill competency.

We recently sat down with representatives from several organizations who are using Skills & Competency Manager to learn how they’re using it, the benefits they’ve discovered, and which features work best for them.

Here’s what we found:

Top Benefits

Roundtable participants shared the top benefits they’ve experienced from using Skills & Competency Manager, which include:

Improved Onboarding Visibility and Optimization

Migrating from a pen-and-paper skill assessment system to technology has driven improved visibility and optimization of the entire onboarding process, saving organizations significant time and money.

Reduced Risk of Penalty or POC Costs

Improved organization and easy online accessibility of skills checklists and training documentation allows organizations to quickly and accurately generate requested employee information during Survey.

More Accurate Financial Forecasting

Robust reporting allows for not only onboarding competency tracking and training, but also data benchmarking for financial forecasting and annual competency assessments.

Favorite Aspects

Qualities of Skills & Competency Manager that participants most appreciate include:

Access to an Onboarding “One-Stop Shop”

MedBridge is an onboarding “one-stop shop,” with skills assessment, training, and documentation combined into a single all-in-one solution. The administrative burden of onboarding is decreased, and clinician-level reporting across skills helps strengthen annual competency documentation.

Better Transparency

Moving onboarding and skills training online allows for better transparency and provides a streamlined format that helps new hires more easily understand the onboarding process and their organization’s expectations. At the same time, preceptors have the insight they need to better prioritize high-value training initiatives. Administrators can now benchmark and track time to productivity and other key metrics, and surveyors appreciate the ease of access and organization of documentation.

An Easier Experience for New Clinicians

Onboarding is less overwhelming for new clinicians—without compromising quality and compliance standards. By organizing the data from competency checklists effectively, organizations are able to identify the most critical skills for their patient population and then prioritize clinician mastery of those skills. New clinicians can refer back to their checklists to reinforce processes, which is especially critical for those transitioning into home care from other settings, boosting both competency and confidence. The move to technology from a pen and paper system has been easier than expected for all involved.

Get more insights by downloading the full roundtable report.

How the MedBridge Skills & Competency Manager Works

With our Skills & Competency Manager, an online self-assessment—customized to the skills crucial for employees at your agency—is assigned to new hires. Assigned preceptors can then review the assessment, identify skill gaps, and create a personalized and targeted training plan to bring staff up to speed quickly and efficiently and get them into the field faster with the skills they need to succeed.

This effective solution is already helping organizations achieve results such as:

• Reducing onboarding time for new hires by seven days
• Lowering new-hire onboarding costs by 17.9 percent ($7,000 in savings per employee, based on a 5.6-week onboarding program)
• Increasing employee satisfaction, with 100 percent of participants surveyed reporting that the quality of education they received during their onboarding was good or excellent.

Download the full roundtable report to learn about the attendees featured in this article, read their testimonials, and more.