WorkforceRx

While it’s customary for companies to claim that ‘people are our most important resource’, today’s WorkforceRx guest, Dr. Angela Jackson, knows that amounts to lip service at many firms. In her new book The Win-Win Workplace: How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom Line Success, Dr. Jackson shares what it looks like when a company walks the talk. In researching 1,700 companies for the book, and based on countless meetings with business leaders, Dr. Jackson spotted commonalities among the most successful workplaces. “I saw investments around centering worker voice, I saw that the leadership was doing deep employee training -- not just for t...

Too many students go through college focused on fulfilling course requirements for their major with insufficient attention to their actual personal and career interests. The result is they earn empty college degrees that are not connected to the life that comes after graduation. Those provocative conclusions come from a new book called Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn't Matter and What Really Does by veteran college administrator Ned Scott Laff, and Scott Carlson, senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “A singular focus on the major winds up confusing students and not allowing them to take advantage of all th...

There’s a growing consensus that the best patient care is delivered by multidisciplinary teams, but as you’ll hear on this episode of WorkforceRx, generating solutions to problems facing healthcare and medical education can benefit from the same interprofessional approach. That’s what our guest, Dr. Patricia Cuff, has learned leading the Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine with a membership that includes academic experts and practitioners from many specialties. “Everyone has a voice in the Forum and everyone is considered an important part of the team. This is actua...

States are often described as laboratories for public policy development on major issues, generating new best practices that can spread to other states and influence federal action. As an acknowledged leader in working to improve healthcare access and quality, California’s innovations in this area are closely watched, including the unusual step it took in the last few years to allow non-traditional providers to participate in its Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal. According to our WorkforceRx guest, Carlina Hansen of the California Health Care Foundation, the idea behind it is to tap provider resources that are more closely connected to th...

Persistent labor shortages have spurred some healthcare systems to take a “grow-your-own” approach that involves upskilling current employees to supplement external recruitment. Today on WorkforceRx, we’re going to learn about an innovator in this area, Ochsner Health System in Louisiana, which uses coaches, apprenticeships, and flexible pathways to help advance its employee’s skills and careers. “You really have to have that mindset shift that we are a learning culture and we're all-in on employee development,” says Missy Hopson, PhD, Ochsner's Chief Learning and Workforce Development Officer. As Hopson shares with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, there have been some impress...

As a physician for many decades and former Secretary of Health and Human Resources in Virginia for eight years, Dr. Bill Hazel has come to believe there is one necessary ingredient to unraveling the very knotty problems the healthcare system faces: collaboration. As he explains to Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, he used his power as Secretary to breakdown government silos to develop multi-agency solutions. Now as CEO of Claude Moore Opportunities -- a public charity focused on workforce development -- he’s pulling players in that space together in a regional and sector-based approach. “I’m a big fan of bri...

To mark the fifth year of our founding and the 100th episode of WorkforceRx, we've tapped a very special member of the Futuro Health family, board member Dr. Joanne Spetz, to share her insights on the nation's healthcare workforce landscape and how Futuro Health fits into efforts to meet the growing demand for allied health workers. “Part of the reason I agreed to be on the board is that Futuro Health is creating a model to really think about how to do allied health training at scale. What components of education can be delivered remotely or delivered on a convenient sc...

We may soon face a future where AI Agents handle the bulk of low-skilled, entry-level work, forcing educators to figure out how to train people to start their careers in the middle of the ladder instead of on the first rung. That’s the conclusion our guest Matt Sigelman is drawing from research on AI conducted by the organization he heads, Burning Glass Institute, a leading labor market analytics firm. “I think there are questions here both for how AI helps people get into work, but also for whether people can move up within it,” he tells Futuro Health CEO Van To...

On this episode of WorkforceRx, we turn our attention to the challenges and opportunities of one of the fastest growing parts of the US workforce: mid-career and older employees. In fact, the percentage of people over sixty-five who are currently employed is nearly twice as high as it was in the 1990s. “The key driver of the growth we're seeing is an increase in financial insecurity for older adults. Nearly half of adults age fifty-five to sixty-six have no retirement savings,” says Anika Heavener, vice president of Innovation and Investments at The SCAN Foundation, an independent public charity focused on solu...

“I really think that everything from this last election to Brexit to the unrest around the country and the world shows that the old economic paradigm of trickle-down economics has left families broke and in debt and in need of a new paradigm,” says Natalie Foster, president of the Economic Security Project. The answer, as she lays out in her new book The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America's Next Economy, is to provide individuals and families with the same sense of security that American businesses enjoy through a web of laws and institutions that provide the stability they need to b...