- Michigan: Mahir Elder, an interventional cardiologist at Detroit Medical Center's (DMC) Cardiovascular Institute, has developed a new diagnostic and treatment process for pulmonary embolism, which kills more than 600,000 people annually. Under the new process, DMC evaluates patients presenting with possible pulmonary embolism symptoms, such as chest pains, with a battery of tests, including blood tests and a CT scan. If pulmonary embolism is confirmed, the ED physician will page the hospital's Pulmonary Embolism Response Team—a group of five interventional cardiologists, several fellows, nurses, cardiovascular technologists, and radiology therapists—and prepare the patient for an immediate catheterization procedure. According to the largest study of its kind, this so-called "Clotbusters" team has treated 250 pulmonary embolism patients with a survival rate of more than 90 percent (Greene, Crain's Detroit Business, 1/15).
- Missouri: Lake Regional Health System CEO Michael Henze will retire on Nov. 1. Henze has served as the system's leader for 27 years, in addition to serving as a member of the Missouri Hospital Association Board of Trustees and a delegate to the American Hospital Association's Regional Policy Board. Lake Regional has formed a search committee to find a replacement (Vaidya, Becker's Hospital Review, 1/13).
- Pennsylvania: Geisinger Health System on Tuesday announced it plans to hire 150 new nurses. Under the recruitment effort, Geisinger will offer incentives of up to $15,000, which could be used as tuition reimbursement, relocation reimbursement, or a sign-on bonus. The health system said the need for new nurses, who will be placed at hospitals in the Scranton and Wilkes-Barre areas, stems from growth within the health system (Lee, WNEP, 1/17).
You've filled the position. Now what?
Retaining new hires is one of the longstanding challenges in health care. Despite manager and HR efforts, newly hired employees continue to turn over at a rate far above that of more tenured staff members. In fact, new hire turnover is a disproportionate driver of an institution's overall turnover rate. Nationally, employees with less than one year of tenure make up nearly 25 percent of all health care turnover.
But there's good news: better employee onboarding can dramatically reduce these rates. And we have two toolkits to help you improve the onboarding process, including editable templates, checklists, and guides to equip both HR and managers to efficiently and effectively onboard new employees.