- Welcome everyone to the Becker's
Healthcare podcast series.
My name is Mariah Mohammed.
I'm a writer and moderator with Becker's Healthcare,
and I'm absolutely thrilled to have
with me today Molly Moran, senior Director
of Ambulatory Clinical Practice
and Workforce Development at Rush University Medical Center.
Molly, it's very nice to have you on the podcast today.
Very excited to talk with you.
To get us started, would you mind please introducing
yourself and telling us a bit about your background?
- Absolutely. Thank you so much
for having me on the podcast today.
My name is Molly Moran
and I am a ally prepared registered nurse
and the senior director of Ambulatory Clinical Practice
and Workforce Development, as you said.
And my background really is as a registered nurse
and I have worked
as a direct care provider in pediatrics at Freestanding
Children's Hospital as well as at an academic medical center
and have really been in ambulatory over the last, uh,
five and a half years.
And over that time I have seen the evolution of ambulatory
and most definitely the growth and
and integration of technology into
this new patient care area
and new in the sense of telehealth
and telemedicine expansion.
Not new in the sense that ambulatory
and community health really have been along for a long time.
So, uh, my role really is to continue to build on
what is already there and,
and continue to help make way for the future.
- Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much
for giving us that background.
And kind of speaking of building, in recent years,
the healthcare industry has seen a growing emphasis on
patient-centered care.
Can you share some examples of
how your organization is placing patients at the center
of care delivery and any, uh, success stories that you have
of how this enhanced patient sa uh, ification and outcomes?
- Most definitely. So at Rush, I like
to say our patients are our true north,
and we really do believe that and, and live that.
And it is integral to our decision making.
And so as I had shared, ambulatory and
and community health have been around for hundreds of years,
but in recent years we've seen an ability
to integrate technology in new ways
to really provide patient centered care in a way
that is meaningful to the patient in a way
that more quickly connects patients with the right level
of provider and the right level of, of care and,
and, uh, question resolution that they may have.
And so we've done a couple of things to really, uh,
build on that from a workforce standpoint.
And one of those, um, really has to do
with assessing our current workforce
and looking at what do we need to do either in terms
of upskilling of current employees
or what do we need to think differently about for the future
so that we can continue to build a workforce
that is comfortable with this technology integration
and also still has the skills training
and education necessary to provide that,
that highest quality, safest patient care.
And through one of our biggest initiatives,
it has been the Medical Assistant apprenticeship program.
And one thing that we had identified was there is a real
need to provide opportunities for individuals
who have an interest in working in healthcare a way
to earn and learn.
And so we did a formal analysis of, uh,
medical assistance who had gone through various, uh,
programs in our community to see what some
of their barriers were to completing their education, uh,
sooner or just challenges they encountered in general,
and really developed a program that was meant
to alleviate those barriers.
We have a wonderful educational partner in
with Harper College in Palatine, Illinois,
who has really helped, um, as the provider of,
of the formal education
and didactic helps meet the needs of our employees,
which in turn is helping to meet the needs of our patients.
- Yeah, thank you so much for giving us that insight
and to delve more into the workforce aspect, um, of
what you were just talking about.
What is your strategy for developing
and maintaining a highly skilled healthcare workforce
capable of adopting those new technologies and care models?
- That's a great question.
So we have a multifaceted approach to
how we are addressing the medical assistance training
and education once they are employed with us.
So as I mentioned, the first is really
through the medical assistant apprenticeship program
and through that program, as I mentioned, we've been able
to, uh, not just have a, a great educational partner,
but our employees also learn multiple different roles that
also impact healthcare.
And so they start, uh, working as a clinic coordinator
and understanding, uh, all of the,
the moving parts that go into
not just checking a patient in,
but everything from insurance
and prior authorizations all the way up through working
as a medical assistant.
Once we have new medical assistants in our organization,
we actually really have the, the great benefit
of having a medical assistant educator on my team.
And she is a medical assistant
and has worked, um, as an MA in a number of different areas
at Rush as, as well as elsewhere over the last 15 years.
And her role primarily focuses on our new hires.
She is, uh, the facilitator of our new hire skills day.
She also facilitates our procedural class day.
So we recognize that so many procedures
that previously were done on inpatient units
in a same day surgery type setting.
Now that testing can be done in ambulatory
or in an outpatient setting, but requires the upskill
because it's not a, a traditional skillset
that's covered in a medical assistant program.
So things like, uh, surgical
or procedural support as well as the pre-cleaning
and high level disinfection processes.
And so her role really is to help our new hires with
learning not just our equipment,
but also learning those new procedures and processes
and then having that also translate to
having medical assistant preceptor classes.
And so recognizing the complexity of the patient population,
really wanting to invest in our MAs to give them the tools
that they need to successfully precept those,
those new medical assistants in the clinic.
We also have recently implemented an annual competency
program for our medical assistants, similar in nature
to ones that, uh, healthcare organizations may be familiar
with for registered nurses or other licensed personnel,
but recognizing that there are high risk and,
and potentially problem grown procedures
that medical assistants now are directly involved in,
where a few years ago they may not have been.
And so it's really for us about creating a,
a wraparound program of support from the time
that an employee enters our organization through the time
that they are, are with us for their career.
- Wonderful. Wonderful.
Thank you so much for giving us that information.
And Molly, before I let you go, the last thing I wanted
to ask you is can you discuss any new initiatives
or projects that Rush is planning for the future
and explain how these align
with their overall strategic vision
for ambulatory clinical practice and workforce development?
- Absolutely. So much like other organizations,
we're looking both at the short term as well as long term
plans for workforce development.
And many of the, the pipeline programs
or as I had shared,
the apprenticeship programs really are an
investment in the long term.
However, what we have seen is
that we do have positive outcomes in terms of retention
of individuals in the program progression
through the program, um, as well
as seeing positive outcomes associated
with our patient experience scores.
And so really our, our job right now is
to look at other opportunities to build similar programs
for individuals who may want to
try a new role in healthcare, um,
or who may want to move from a nonclinical
to a clinical role and really focus on that upskill
of individuals in a way that they're able
to not just have work-life balance, um,
but that really work becomes also part
of their formal education.
- Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you so much, Molly.
Uh, for those final thoughts, this has been an amazing
and informative discussion.
So again, I wanna thank you so much
for coming on Becker's Healthcare
and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
- Thank you so much. - It's so important
for leaders at the top of organizations to keep learning,
stay sharp, grow their networks,
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