Human resources administration is a vital function within healthcare businesses, from sourcing the right talent to fill open roles to building talent management strategies that boost employee engagement and retention. But with unique staffing and regulatory challenges, healthcare HR requires even more focus and care than HR in other industries.
As such, you want to build a strong team of healthcare HR professionals and provide them with the right tools to keep your healthcare organization running smoothly. Let's explore the role of a healthcare HR professional and learn more about how healthcare HR software can address key challenges facing healthcare organizations.
What Is Healthcare HR?
Within healthcare organizations, the human resources department is charged with hiring, training, and managing an organization’s employees. Human resources covers key areas of employee relations such as recruiting, benefits administration, performance management, and more. In healthcare settings, HR professionals play an especially important role in ensuring that providers and team members have the tools they need to deliver optimum patient care.
The healthcare industry presents a number of unique HR challenges — including staffing shortages and enhanced regulatory requirements — that can make hiring and managing talent more difficult compared to other industries. Healthcare HR professionals also have the challenging task of building strategies to keep morale high and fend off compassion fatigue and employee burnout within the organizations that they support.
Healthcare HR software can help you address these challenges more effectively by streamlining common functions like job posting, payroll processing, performance management, and employee check-ins.
However, many HR solutions are not designed to address the unique challenges of the healthcare field. That’s why healthcare HR leaders need to choose solutions designed specifically for healthcare companies, such as ContinuumCloud’s human capital management (HCM) platform.
Key Responsibilities of Healthcare HR
The field of healthcare HR encompasses several important business functions within health organizations. Integrated human resources software can help address each area within one unified platform.
Recruiting
Recruiting is one of the most significant workforce issues for healthcare organizations, and ongoing labor shortages and high burnout rates within the industry exacerbate the problem. Recruiting is a preeminent challenge for behavioral health organizations, which often face larger budgetary challenges than other healthcare organizations.
In the 2023 Behavioral Health Industry Trends Report, behavioral healthcare leaders ranked recruiting as a top priority but cited several challenges that have hindered their recruiting goals. Issues such as a lack of qualified applicants and an inability to offer competitive pay have made sourcing and hiring top talent a struggle for behavioral healthcare HR professionals.
Since healthcare roles frequently require specialized skills and credentials, there is often more competition for qualified candidates. Sourcing candidates with the skills you need and enticing them to join your organization is tricky if you don’t have the right tools. The recruiting features offered in our HCM platform can make it easier to find and hire the right candidates for your open roles.
With seamless one-click job postings that help organizations quickly distribute job ads to the sites that job seekers use most and organized applicant tracking features that make it easy to rate and review applicants efficiently, healthcare HR software can simplify the recruiting process.
Onboarding
The quality of your organization’s onboarding process can have a major impact on worker turnover, so it is imperative that healthcare organizations make a strong first impression. Healthcare HR professionals are in charge of creating an efficient yet thorough onboarding process that provides new hires with the tools that they need to get up and running in their new jobs. This can include setting them up with their necessary logins and work materials, conducting orientations, and getting them enrolled in benefits.
Organizations like behavioral health facilities that have high levels of turnover may need to hire and onboard employees quite frequently. However, the process still needs to be organized and should not feel rushed. To help, healthcare HR professionals can use HR software to streamline the onboarding process without skipping any steps or overlooking important tasks.
Onboarding tasks such as setting up employee profiles, completing onboarding paperwork, and enrolling employees in training courses can be managed within HR software options like ContinuumCloud.
Performance Management
Performance management is an area of healthcare HR that focuses on tracking, rewarding, and improving employee performance. Performance management can help struggling employees improve their skills and job performance while also allowing your top team members to grow and develop themselves to reach the next step in their careers.
Healthcare HR professionals can use digital solutions like ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform to support performance reviews, goal-setting, and other talent management initiatives. HCM software platforms can also facilitate better communication between employees and managers by providing streamlined check-ins, templated feedback messages, and transparent goal tracking.
Benefits Administration
Healthcare is all about managing your patients’ health, but it’s also important to take care of the employees who serve them. Benefits administration is an integral part of healthcare HR that involves managing the benefits enrollment process and ensuring that employees have access to the benefits that they need.
Healthcare HR professionals are there to answer questions and guide employees through the process, but most benefits enrollment is now done virtually with HR software. This is good news for healthcare agencies that have embraced telehealth and remote work.
Digital platforms like our HCM can help employees review their benefits options, make their selections, add dependents, and complete their enrollment online. We also have helpful enrollment tracking tools to help HR team members keep tabs on which employees have finished their enrollment and who may need a reminder before the deadline.
The Importance of Healthcare HR in Addressing Common Healthcare Industry Challenges
Having strong healthcare HR practices can help your organization address key challenges such as staffing, regulatory compliance, and more.
Managing Healthcare Staffing
As behavioral health organizations continue to struggle with employee retention and recruiting, maintaining proper staffing coverage can be a challenge. Behavioral health organizations need to maintain appropriate staffing levels and hire the most qualified talent to ensure that patients are safe and able to access care reliably. Understaffed healthcare facilities or organizations are also more at risk for employee burnout, as staff will often need to maintain higher workloads to accommodate staffing shortages.
ContinuumCloud’s Position Control feature can help organizations get a clearer view of their staffing levels and fill open roles more efficiently. Position Control gives administrators and HR leaders detailed insights into their current workforce, open roles, and labor spending to help them identify where additional help is needed and which roles to prioritize for hiring.
Meeting Regulatory Compliance Requirements
Healthcare organizations typically have heavier compliance requirements than traditional businesses and healthcare HR staff can play a key role in supporting regulatory compliance. Healthcare HR professionals need to stay on top of not only standard employment law compliance but also healthcare credentialing and license renewals. They also often manage annual employee training requirements related to safety and confidentiality as well.
ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform provides the healthcare HR tools that organizations need to maintain compliance. Another helpful feature of Position Control within ContinuumCloud’s HCM system is the ability to track clinician license expiration and renewals.
With Position Control, healthcare HR professionals can assign specific certification or licensing requirements to specific positions within the organization rather than adding them on an individual level to each employee’s profile. This allows for a more thorough credential management system by ensuring that every employee in a credentialed job role will have renewal tracking and notifications set up. Employers can also use our HCM portal to distribute compliance-related updates and notices, such as required annual labor law disclosures.
Improving Patient Satisfaction
While patient satisfaction may not seem like an HR issue, proper talent management can help organizations provide a better patient experience. Healthcare HR includes key areas such as timekeeping and attendance, performance reviews, training, and other factors that can ultimately impact patient care.
Patient care workers that regularly come in late or do not meet other performance expectations can provide a negative patient experience. With helpful performance and timekeeping reporting, healthcare HR software tools can help human resources teams check in on frequent tardiness or other employee activities that may be adversely impacting patient care and satisfaction.
Take Your Organization’s Healthcare HR to the Next Level
ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform was built specifically with healthcare HR in mind. It’s designed to expertly meet the needs of behavioral health organizations and manage all healthcare HR activities in one unified platform. Oversee each step of the employee lifecycle, starting from the employee’s initial job application, in one centralized system to make human resources administration a breeze.
Get in touch to learn more about how your organization can streamline its healthcare HR tasks with ContinuumCloud.
