After graduating from medical school over a decade ago, I have been working with home health agencies of all different sizes and needs. I observed that onboarding was extremely challenging, regardless of the size or resources of an agency.

Educators & Clinical Management were “recreating the wheel” every time a clinician was onboarded. There was no standard process or content that was in-place. Content had to be updated every time regulations changed, due to competing priorities, content was always lagging regulations and evidence-based practices.

Gap in communication between different functions meant either the new hire was released too soon, or not soon enough.  Both scenarios created disengaged new hire who is likely to quit within first 90 days! 

I searched for content already available that could help me onboard clinicians and streamline my department's processes.  I reviewed content libraries provided by the biggies (Elsevier, Medbridge, Relias)...

There are over 10,000 skilled Medicare-Certified home care agencies in the United States employing over hundreds of thousands of skilled clinicians providing care to over 2.4 million elderlies annually. The annual turnover rate for an average home care agency is over 60 percent, with replacement costs estimated at $50k per nurse.

This means Industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to train tens of thousands of clinicians to keep up with their current patient needs. With Baby Boomers beginning to utilize Medicare resources, demand for skilled home care clinicians is expected to grow significantly (per BLS Data ~40%) over the next decade.

A robust orientation and meaningful mentorship program have been shown to be two important protective factors for nursing retention. A successful transition-to-practice helped new nurses become competent and confident in their roles and enabled organization to build a dedicated nursing staff to achieve their mission (Pennington, Gwen et....

Hello & Welcome to our blog!

For the first blog, I want to share why I decided to build a standardized education and orientation platform for home care agencies.....

During my post as the Director of Quality, Education & Program Development in the area's biggest Home Health Agency, the agency was under constant pressure to grow!  Growth meant capacity management, and in order to grow capacity we needed a solid recruitment and retention strategy. 

Our program had the following barriers:  

1.  Hiring full time educators was not an option (initially!) We were part of a major corporation and getting FTEs approved would have meant giving up our first born or at a minimum a limb!  Also, it would have taken closer to a year just to get approval and finally hire an educator!
   1. So all of us in management were tagged for teaching part of orientation! Our clinical management, Utilization Review and Quality Consultant all had to dedicate 2-4 hours per week to...