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Solving Revenue Cycle Staffing and Hiring Shortages with the nThrive Transitions Program

April 1, 2021
April 1, 2021

A Q&A with Tom Ormondroyd, President, Education and Analytics, nThrive, about the nThrive Transition Program

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 9 of the top 30 positions with understaffing or lack of qualified individuals across all industries work within healthcare. Revenue cycle roles such as Patient Access reps, Back-Office specialists, CDI Specialists, Case Managers, and other revenue cycle roles are either short in supply or limited on what they have available for qualified professionals in their market.

What has driven the development of Transitions?

nThrive faced the same staffing challenges for key roles, leading the nThrive Education team to create Transitions, where we could take underemployed or unemployed individuals and turn them into healthcare professionals in these hard-to-fill roles. nThrive has worked with state offices, labor department offices, non-profits, and the Vice President’s Apprenticeship office to first fill nThrive roles through Transitions, but also to support our clients with the same challenges. Our clients are our greatest source of information, and many of them told us how hard it was to find employees and how expensive it was to use recruiting firms. We knew that our nThrive Education could help solve their problem as well. The Transitions program essentially lets hospitals grow their own staff from the ranks of existing employees or in some cases the communities they serve.

For whom does it work best?

Transitions works for any hospital or system that is struggling to hire, train, and retain talent.

What are the nuts and bolts details of the program? Duration/timeframe, qualifications, etc.

The core of the program is built around nThrive Education, our award-winning SaaS based education solution. From there, it’s fully customizable, based on the objectives, the roles needed to ‘create, and resources available to facility. Depending on the role or job function, the program can be either a few weeks to a few months long, 100% face to face, a hybrid of online and face to face instruction, or completely online. nThrive Education works closely with our clients to assist them in the setup, initiation, and delivery of the program, assisting them as much or as little as they desire. We have clients where we have provided the instructor and total program, while other clients, using our online content, have completely run it in-house.

What kinds of problems does it help to solve?

The program can solve myriad problems that all organizations face, such as a shortage of critical skills, turnover, lack of qualified applicants in the given market, HR or labor restrictions, lack of career pathing, community unemployment rate issues, and even budgetary challenges associated with hiring staff.

Can you share any specific anecdotes about success for organizations using it?

There are several that come to mind, but our on-going partnership with the state of Vermont has been highly successful and responsible for putting over 35 unemployed and underemployed VT residents back to work in great careers. We are very proud of that. 

About nThrive Transitions

In an economy where many people still struggle to find high paying jobs, the healthcare industry is the exception. In fact, there is a shortage of qualified workers across many healthcare fields. According to an article in Modern Healthcare, “Healthcare is one of the few industries in which there are more job openings than unemployed workers.”1 Moreover, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9 of the top 30 occupations expected to see the most growth are in health care, and the World Health Organization relates that the world will be short 12.9 million healthcare workers by 20351 . To address this issue, nThrive Education™2 created the nThrive Education™ Transitions Program (Transitions Program). “We saw healthcare organizations struggling to fill positions, and communities with high unemployment so we decided to build a program that mutually benefits health care organizations and job seekers alike,” says Tom Ormondroyd, nThrive president of education and analytics.

How the nThrive Education Transitions Program Works

As part of the Transitions Program, nThrive Education is partnering with health care organizations across the nation to provide education and training to unemployed and underemployed workers, many whom have no healthcare experience. Upon successful completion of the program, graduates qualify for high-demand health care jobs, such as medical coders, billers, patient access representatives, clinical documentation improvement specialists, and patient financial service representatives.

This program can be used by healthcare organizations to support internal growth of coding populations by creating an educational ladder that provides coders the technical acumen to advance to more complex forms of coding such, same day surgery, in-patient and emergency room coding.

The Transitions Program leverages the nThrive Education revenue cycle eLearning solution – a key factor in rapidly educating program candidates by evaluating competency, and targeting education to knowledge weaknesses as training progresses and focusing the education only on the job to be created. With more than two million learners, nThrive Education is the most innovative, widely adopted online healthcare education solution.

Learn more about HealthStream’s solutions for improving revenue cycle operations in healthcare.

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