Healthcare professionals need to keep their skills and competencies current to provide patients with the best possible care, but competing priorities can make it far too easy for skills development to go by the wayside. A talent management tool makes it easy for healthcare organizations to track employee skills and offer support where it’s needed, and the right system could mean the difference between successful and unsuccessful clinical outcomes.

PeopleFluent Talent Management is a reliable, robust solution that helps you ensure your employees are ready for whatever comes their way (and that your organization stays prepared for regulatory audits.) Read below to learn five ways PeopleFluent makes healthcare skills management a breeze.

READ MORE ON EMPLOYEE SKILLS TRACKING | ‘7 Assessment Methods to Kickstart Your Workforce Skills Evaluations’

1) Reclaim Time for Quality Patient Care

Your healthcare organization could easily have thousands of clinical employees, and documenting their various skills assessments can be a cumbersome task. For instance, most healthcare providers need to assess new hires’ skills and competencies within their first 90 days to maintain compliance with regulatory agencies like The Joint Commission. Newly hired nurses and other clinical staff often need to demonstrate their competency in upwards of 50 different skills! These skills need to be seen “in action” by their supervisors, making documentation even more complex.

Some organizations manage these processes with paper binders and checklists, which are inefficient at best. PeopleFluent eliminates the need for physical evidence by digitally storing competency assessments and compliance documentation. Clinicians and supervisors can access the talent management system with tablets or mobile workstation computers, making it easier to assess employees’ skills and instantly update records on the job without disrupting patient care.

2) Redeploy Critical Resources

Tracking skills and competencies keeps your staff prepared and compliant, but doing so within a dedicated talent management platform also gives you a quick, high-level overview of where specific skills lie within your organization. If one of your departments or facilities needs more support with specific skills, you can leverage PeopleFluent’s software to determine which employees have critical competencies that can help fill gaps. Compare employees who have critical skills with your various departments’ current needs. Make swift, strategic choices about how to redeploy your resources to better serve your organization and, most importantly, your patients.

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3) Visualize Employee Skills

All nurses have a set of common skills they can draw upon, but someone working consistently in an obstetrics department will have different specialized competencies than a nurse who usually works in a physician’s office. If a patient enters your short-staffed emergency room and is about to deliver a child, you’re more likely to call for an obstetrics nurse to assist your patient. Understanding which nurses and other clinical staff have specialized skills to meet specific patient needs can help you be prepared for the unexpected and deploy talent effectively throughout your organization.

PeopleFluent Talent Management includes employee dashboards with data visualizations to help you understand each person’s strengths and areas for improvement. You can quickly identify which employees are eligible to work in various departments within your organization based on their current skills and competencies, and you can match your clinical teams’ collective skills to patients’ needs to offer the best possible care.

4) Deliver a World-Class Patient Care Experience

PeopleFluent Talent Management includes a configurable workflow process that lets you spend less time assigning skills and more time focusing on patients’ needs. See which clinicians have been successfully assessed on various competencies, and automatically assign skills according to an individual’s specific position within the organization or assigned hospital, surgery center, clinic, or office location.

It’s common for clinicians to work with multiple supervisors or other employees who are authorized to sign off on skills assessments. PeopleFluent’s talent software allows multiple authorized individuals on a healthcare team to access digital files without compromising the document’s integrity. This ensures that skills assessments are completed swiftly and accurately without impeding patient care.

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5) Prepare for Accreditation

While delivering high-quality patient care is always your top priority, maintaining compliance with regulatory agencies like The Joint Commission is vital to your mission. These governing bodies exist to ensure that healthcare facilities and their staff meet service, skill, and care expectations—and they don’t provide much notice before dropping by to check on your facilities!

It’s crucial to have your assessment documentation current and readily available when regulatory agents examine your organization. Digital records are easy to maintain and update, and they can be retrieved almost instantly to prove your employees’ skills are current and your organization is compliant with regulatory requirements. This makes accreditation processes run more smoothly so you can get back to what your organization does best: caring for its patients.