Competency management enables Mountain States Health Alliance to impact its operations in two significant ways:

1. Potential reduction of staffing costs in the future
2. Minimization of potential litigation related to noncompliance with regulatory standards for clinicians’ on-the-job performance

Mountain States Health Alliance Leadership sought to transform its paper-based list of nonstandard competencies to an automated model creating a single, accurate view of job role competencies aligned with its business goals. With the standardization of competencies and the implementation of TEDS competency management platform, MSHA anticipates enhanced operational efficiency; eased regulatory compliance; mitigated staffing costs; and standardized selection, development, and management of its employees.

Mountain States Health Alliance (MSHA) healthcare delivery is facility-centric with more than 90 percent of all care delivery taking place within MSHA’s 13 hospitals. This decentralized management and governance make the identification, review, deployment, and optimization of standardized competencies difficult. Apart from MSHA leaders, these challenges especially apply to the nursing staff, which comprises a large portion of MSHA’s employee population.

(This post is a continuation from Key Learnings of Implementing Competency Management.)

Standardizing and then automating competencies enable Mountain States Health Alliance (MSHA) to create a real-time inventory of the collective skills and competencies of its workforce. By integrating leaders’ and clinicians’ job roles, tasks, and competencies, MSHA leaders readily identified skill gaps. Once identified, skill gaps were closed through tailored learning programs to meet current needs, safety, and regulatory requirements.

In standardizing competency models and moving to an online platform Mountain States Health Alliance (MSHA) shares eight lessons learned:

1. Define Terminology. One of the first steps in implementing a new process is settling on process-related definitions. The implementation of MSHA’s competency evaluation and tracking system was hampered by not defining terms such as “competency,” “proficiency,” and “checklist” early in the process.