The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the healthcare industry — and the people who work in it — immensely. While some are working more and are adapting to new circumstances and roles, others have shifted to working remotely or may have been furloughed. Our CEO Andrew Malley was recently invited as a guest on Mike Biselli’s podcast Passionate Pioneers to talk about healthcare workforce development. When asked what healthcare workers could do to adapt in these situations, he shared these insights.

Focus on skills when evaluating education

Andrew suggests not treating education as something that should be checked off of a list or solely to amass continuing education units. Instead, he encourages healthcare professionals to enroll in programs that can give them real skills that will be relevant to their daily work.

“One way OpusVi ensures that we create actually useful programs is to always build programs with industry leaders. Yes, we bring in universities to provide an academic framework and quality assurance, but we also bring in subject matter experts to shape the program and to join as facilitators and counselors. This ensures that when learners graduate, they have skills for the real world — and then they have confidence because they’ve heard from people like them who went through it all to get to where they are.”

Look to gain skills that make a large business impact

As health systems tend to measure the value of education in terms of return on investment (ROI) — be it through increased efficiencies or better patient care — and will do so even more now that many systems are struggling financially, Andrew encourages healthcare professionals to gain skills that can help them to make an impact on their organization.

“We keep this in mind in terms of our program portfolio. The areas we’re looking at in the next 12 to 18 months is where healthcare systems can be improved in a very tangible way. For example, how do we move clinicians from medical practice into business practice to help them better understand budgets and numbers and be more efficient? How do we help administrators be better with data? How do we make more staff more conscious of health law and ethics in healthcare? I don’t mean that we aim to get to a point where all staff in an organization understand issues at the highest level, but it’s helpful to create a common understanding.”

 

Be on the lookout for innovation and upcoming trends

The healthcare industry is complex and moving incredibly fast. All too often, the delivery of care lags behind innovation in areas such as diagnostics and advanced treatments. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to prepare the workforce for the digitization of work was a concern. 53% of CEOs and business leaders who were surveyed in Deloitte’s 2020 Global Human Capital Trends Report agreed that “between half and all of their workforce will need to change their skills and capabilities in the next three years.”

“Be relevant, look at what’s needed in healthcare not 20 years ago, but today, tomorrow, next year, and in the next five years. Be relevant to the challenges that healthcare is going to be facing. For example, if you’re in clinical practice, learn about business. That doesn’t mean you have to do a full MBA. Take short courses to understand profit, loss, efficiencies, operational practices, mitigation, compliance, ethics, and cybersecurity. It comes down to the notion of applied skills and competencies, things that make you better at your job in a real way and that will make you a more compelling candidate for new positions.”

 

If you’re interested in listening to the whole conversation between Andrew and Mike, just click the play button!