For Yale New Haven Health, one of the key components in being able to successfully launch a hospital-at-home initiative was maintaining “the simple connectivity and continuity of the medical record,” said Lisa Stump, SVP and Chief Information and Digital Transformation Officer, in a recent podcast interview. The others, which are just as critical, are appointing the right people to help lead the project and identifying an outside partner that can provide the missing pieces.

During the discussion, Stump also talked about the challenges Yale New Haven Health is facing with retaining IT talent; how her team was able to draw on relationships and trust during the most difficult days of Covid-19; and why it’s so important for leaders to be able to tie the everyday work teams are doing to the mission of healthcare.

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Key Takeaways:

* It’s not the tenured staff who tend to pose the flight risk, but rather, those who spend a year with the organization, get the training and experience, and look elsewhere. “Turnover is one of our biggest challenges right now.”

* The big advantage healthcare organizations have over other industries is the mission. For leaders, the task is to make individuals feel “like we’re part of something bigger.”

* For Yale New Haven Health, being able to “draw on relationships and credibility you build over time” was critical in getting through the early stages of Covid.

* “Innovation isn’t just about spinning up a company and intellectual property; it’s about making care better for the people who provide it.”

Q&A with Lisa Stump, Yale New Haven Health, Part 2 [Click here to view Part 1]

Gamble:  You touched on recruiting, which is something that so many leaders are struggling with right now. How are you approaching this?

Stump:  It’s really difficult in terms of attrition. The ability for people to work from home for just about anyone in the world led to an exponential increase in the competition for our talent. Our IT workforce already had been utilizing remote work for a while before the pandemic, but it was one or two days a week to help people with work life balance. Now, many of my team now are 100 percent remote.

And we have found that people who have with the organization for 10 years are loyal; they’re not as much of a flight risk. What we’re seeing is the people who come in new to the organization, we’re spending all of that investment on training them and building their skill set working in a big, complex place. And within a year or two, they’re leaving. That turnover, I think, is one of our biggest challenges right now. Like many organizations, we’re trying to maintain competitive wages and benefits when the hospitals are under significant financial challenges, and it’s been very hard. Talented IT people can go work for industry or banking or tech companies that are able to pay more than most of us can in healthcare. I’ve got more vacancies right now than I want.

 

Gamble:  When it’s difficult to compete and you can’t offer the same salaries as other industries, is that where you try to tie in the mission of healthcare?

Stump:  Yes. And we find that the grass is always greener. Folks will leave and then come back and say, ‘This really has a better upside.’ It’s that mission-driven commitment to healthcare in their local community — their mom’s healthc...