The Care Management Academy: A Revolutionary New Training Program

A look into NYC Health+Hospital/ Community Care’s promising new program poised to better equip its workforce to provide transformative care in the community

Introduction

What does the future of community-based healthcare look like? NYC Health+Hospitals/Community Care (“Community Care”) is evolving as a leader in improving healthcare delivery through growing a more prepared, effective, passionate, and understanding workforce in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Reaching outside of the hospitals and clinics, Community Care is dedicated to supporting system-wide healthcare transformation efforts and proactive implementation of a population health care management strategy, one that aims to address avoidable human suffering by focusing on effective clinical integration and providing the highest quality of care and support to patients as they return to the community.

Community Care has seen great success so far in harnessing innovative methods that improve patient outcomes, engagement, and experience within their communities. Examples of strategies being used by outreach workers, care coordinators, and Nurses include motivational interviewing to teach chronic disease self-management strategies, screening to identify the resources necessary to reduce patient barriers, practicing interdisciplinary team-based collaborations, and improving the patient experience.

Embedded within these new innovations and successes that Community Care has made so far is a revolutionary new training program, the Care Management Academy (CMA).

In response to the rapidly changing healthcare delivery landscape and the new focus on providing compassionate, effective patient care in the community, the CMA was designed in 2018 as an experimental eight- to ten-week training program.  It placed participants in a blended learning curriculum comprising both sophisticated eLearning content and action-oriented, in-person class workshops. Through the blended learning model, emphasis on experiential learning over rote learning, and a hands-on approach that involves a variety of real-life human-centered learning scenarios, students graduate equipped with the most effective, human-centered strategies for improving patient outcomes, engagement, and experience.

Our Role

To deliver the CMA, Community Care hosts its blended learning trainings and manages registration, tracking, and reporting on HWapps, a customized Learning Management System (LMS) designed and developed by us (HWNY). On this customized HWapps LMS, participants in the eight-week program participate in 25 interactive eLearning training modules and register for their weekly in-person workshops. Training topics range from Care Coordination fundamentals, effective communication strategies, motivational interviewing, mental health conditions, health coaching and electronic medical records, chronic disease management, and crisis management and stress. Since its inception, the CMA has graduated two cohorts of 25 participants.

To set the program up for long-term sustainability, eligible participants have the ability to participate in an additional two-week “Train-the-Trainer” extension after the eight weeks are complete to qualify them as CMA trainers for future cohorts.

The third and fourth cohorts are scheduled for early 2020.

Impact

What Community Care is building is exceptional for many reasons. With a vision of improving patient outcomes, investing in the workforce, and building an infrastructure for future sustainability of the model, Community Care is successfully transforming concept into action with measurable results. Ms. Jennifer Melendez-Suarez Associate Executive Director for Workforce Development and Training stated, “In our pursuit of excellence and our mission to deliver compassionate health ser­vices with dignity and respect to all, our longstanding hope is to recruit, train, empower, and retain the highest quality workforce that will wholeheartedly seek to protect, promote, and improve the health of individuals and communities in New York City.”

At an institutional level, the packaging of a Care Management Training into a standardized model is a major achievement. This creative and forward-thinking model, emphasizing blended- and scenario-based learning, is poised to boost engagement, knowledge retention, experience, motivation, and ownership in the graduates of the Academy.  According to Bielka Feliz, 2019 Class Valedictorian, “the expression of what the academy has meant to me will not end [here] but will be reflected in my work moving forward and my reawakened commitment to not only my department but to the patient experience as a whole.” The Academy is creating a learning culture for healthcare professionals that will provide employees validation, support in the work that they do, recognition, and foster their development, personally and professionally. Through this, Community Care is guaranteeing they can continue to provide these world-class Care Management services far into the future.

Learn More Today about the Care Management Academy. 

To connect with Community Care and learn more about the Care Management Academy, please contact CommunityCareLearning@nychhc.org. 

Nurturing Direct Care Workers through Engaging Experiences

In 2014, the New York State Department of Health allocated $245M through March 2020 for the workforce development of the long term care sector. In 2017, Ladders to Value (LTV) was identified as a Workforce Investment Organization to oversee managed long-term care plans in certain regions of New York State to drive recruitment, retraining, and redeployment efforts.

To integrate the administration and management of workforce initiatives occurring across the state, LTV has provided streamlined solutions within their own network that make it easy for their training vendors to manage their training delivery. This new experience provided to training vendors allows for the acceleration of impact numbers and reduction in the time and cost needed to administer and report on them.

After LTV had a streamlined process in place where they could collect and track in-person trainings among long-term care employees across their entire state-wide network, certain administrative burdens arose in the presence of so much data. In order for LTV to grow into other workforce initiatives such as recruitment and retention, it needed to offload the burden of tracking and reporting and find an automated, yet safe solution for empowering employers and training vendors to self-manage more.

Anticipating this need, HWNY consulted with LTV on potential solutions for addressing the burden. The idea for a custom-built level of access for training vendors to access the workforce platform was conceived and soon implemented. As a solution, the vendor’s dashboard provides a first-class experience for training vendors to easily schedule their training sessions, upload participant rosters, verify completed sessions, and deliver assessments and surveys all in one easy-to-use interface. The solution was piloted with two training vendors and is soon being launched state-wide.

The vendor dashboard was implemented ahead of schedule to two vendors and adopted as a better data management solution. So far, the vendor dashboard as a solution to provide a better experience for vendors in scheduling and managing trainings has seen excellent time-saving success.

BeYourLocalHero Regional Recruitment Campaign

Leatherstocking Collaborative Health Partners (LCHP) is a PPS that serves several counties in upstate New York with 98 partners dedicated to transforming healthcare delivery in their communities towards a more collaborative, patient-centered, and accessible model. From the onset of DSRIP in 2014, HWNY has collaborated and consulted with LCHP on successfully launching its key workforce initiatives.  

LCHP’s partner network is spread out geographically across five counties in Upstate/Central New York, much of it rural, which caused problems with streamlining information, data, processes, and projects. It needed a technology partner to advise and implement a capable solution to workforce development across its network. 

Because LCHP’s network is mostly rural, it was facing major recruitment and retention challenges to address the growing workforce attrition in the region. 

HWNY provided a customized LMS for LCHP which was built to capture and report on key project metrics for DSRIP, as well as account services and end-user support to provide a great experience while using the platform. Additionally, HWNY provides workforce consulting and support to ensure that LCHP is able to report quarterly to New York State on the progress of its network’s workforce development. 

In 2018, HWNY created and launched a recruitment campaign in the LCHP region aimed at filling key healthcare positions in the area. The three key goals of the ongoing campaign are to: 

1. Recruit High School students and individuals living in the region into high-need careers
2. Bring healthcare providers into the region to practice 
3. Provide career development and growth opportunities to healthcare workers in the region 

The campaign is hosted on a website designed and managed by HWNY and promoted across multiple social media platforms in the form of various digital media content.

Through HWNY’s solutions, LCHP has been able to deliver trainings across its network, as well as successfully report all workforce data across its network. 

Through years of consulting, HWNY has advised and recommended sustainability strategies for long-term workforce development. In 2018, HWNY designed and piloted a recruitment campaign that is still ongoing, as mentioned above.

To date, efforts to make this recruitment campaign successful include:

• An online digital engagement platform

This platform highlights high-need health careers in the LCHP region, shares a multitude of resources focused on professional growth and development, and provides relevant information about the region. In addition, online users can also access relocation resources and information on trainings, experiential opportunities, and educational programs to help with career pipelines all within the LCHP region. To date, there have been over 700 page views on the website since September 2019 when it went live. 

• Interviewing local healthcare professionals within the high-need careers

Between April and December of 2019, HWNY interviewed 15 healthcare professionals at 5 different healthcare organizations across the LCHP region. The individuals interviewed are featured on social media and on the campaign website. Additionally, more healthcare professionals have agreed to be filmed and interviewed.

• Social media presence and digital media

With the use of social media, HWNY was able to create and share campaign-driven digital media content. Multiple HWNY-produced videos and images have been posted since the launching of the campaign accompanied by a campaign-specific hashtag. One video garnered over 1,000 views and 28 shares on Facebook alone. Another video reached over 800 views and 18 shares on Facebook. This resulted in an increase of new users coming to the website. In addition, a campaign video was created and shared, resulting in nearly 900 views across all platforms. 

The BeYourLocalHero campaign continues to drive candidates to the recruitment website, and plans for additional interviews and media curation have been established.  HWNY continues to promote the heroes of LCHP and inspire those interested in the field to learn more.

Med Students Immerse into Rural Health

NAHEC and CNYAHEC are nonprofits within the AHEC system whose missions are to improve healthcare workforce development in New York. The Rural Immersion Program is a highly successful program that allows medical students to meet various healthcare professionals over a week long period in a rural healthcare facility.

 NAHEC and CNYAHEC wanted to increase the number of participants in the program, so they began working with HWNY to assist them with their recruitment needs. HWNY helped create a seamless, mobile accessible registration platform for the program. In addition to this, a video was produced to promote the program, along with rural health as a whole. The video can be viewed here.

 Between 2013 and August of 2019, 116 students participated in the Rural Immersion program. Some of the rural health facilities involved in the program include:

• River Hospital Nursing Home
• Little Falls Hospital
• Canton-Potsdam Hospital
• Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center
• Oswego Hospital

 The NAHEC website says this about the Program’s success:

So far, the program has been highly accredited and extremely successful in influencing undergraduate students to continue studying medicine with the intent to bring their services to rural areas.

 With HWNY’s assistance, applying and registering for programs like Rural Immersion has been made easier and more accessible. It is also conveniently managed on the back-end for CNYAHEC and NAHEC staff.

Enabling Compliant Residents – Day One

OneCity Health is New York City’s largest Performing Provider System (PPS) and is sponsored by the largest public health care system in the United States, NYC Health + Hospitals. HWNY began working with OneCity Health in 2017 to advance their mission and help meet their DSRIP workforce deliverables. Since then, HWNY has provided consulting on digital training solutions to train more people easily and quicker than before, planning and deployment of training impact and evaluation tracking, customization of an HWapps Learning Management platform, and development of various training features and reporting tools that seek to automate existing manual processes to save time.

Through this, HWNY continues to provide OneCity Health a customized solution for training deployment across multiple healthcare organizations. The strength in OneCity Health’s Learning Management System rests not just in the power of the highly project-specific technology, but also in the resources that allow for continuous streamlined implementation of the larger training delivery mechanism that helps OneCity Health deliver metric-based, professional development, and value-adding training resources to its partner network quicker and easier.

In total, the OneCity Health Learning Management System supports training delivery and provides career-enhancement and professional development opportunities to 120,000 healthcare employees across the PPS network.

73,000 users with access to career-enhancing trainings

25,000 registrations into trainings

Over 225+ trainings available across numerous catalogs and initiatives

Features of this Project:

• Highly customized HWapps Learning Management System
  • A substantial amount of time was reserved for implementation at the start of this project; considerable collaboration, planning, design, and development was conducted in partnership with OneCity Health to design a Learning Management System with the capability to serve their entire network’s DSRIP needs
  • An emphasis on user-experience lead to an advanced user dashboard tool, comprehensive automated and manual communication tools, and innovative ways to showcase training initiatives and engage with employees
  • Powerful new databases designed to support large-scale aggregation and tracking
  • Day-to-day attendance tracking tools for in-person trainings designed to minimize the burden of manually processing data for OneCity Health
  • Implementation of an advanced class capacity tool that automated the process of coordinating enrollment in trainings with space-limitations
  • A tool to automate post-training evaluations
  • A built-out Support section with both user and administrative guides, support FAQs, and resources
  • Advanced administrative dashboards custom-designed around providing OneCity Health training managers a time-saving hub to operate from
• Onboarding Health + Hospitals Employees Process
  • As NYC Health + Hospitals saw the effectiveness of the OneCity Health Learning Management System in quickly enrolling large numbers of employees into trainings, it became interested in HWNY’s ability to address a growing need: for incoming onboarding employee rounds, how can OneCity Health and NYC Health + Hospitals effectively manage the enrollment of thousands of people across multiple locations before training deadlines pass? Through collaboration, a process and a technology solution quickly poised itself to address this need. HWNY would collaborate with OneCity Health to utilize a customized bulk-enrollment tool to enroll onboarding employees automatically and confirm their enrollment automatically over email. When the training was complete, the onboarding employees would be marked as “complete.”

• Integrated, seamless access to trainings for all NYC Health + Hospital employees
  • To provide the best user-experience for NYC Health + Hospitals’ over 64,000 employees, HWNY successfully implemented fully integrated single-sign on (SSO) for employees to access trainings on the OneCity Health Learning Management System directly from the native Health + Hospitals environment. HWNY integrated with PeopleSoft, H+H’s internal software, to share data and make this possible.
• HWNY Consulting
  • HWNY consulted with OneCity Health in order to strategically transition the network to a digital environment. Specifically, HWNY advised and participated in communication, outreach, preparation of promotional material, and deployment of the entire project across such a large network in a way that minimized the “culture shock” of digitizing training processes and maximized interest and understanding in the value of the project among stakeholders.
• Continuous Agile Development
  • HWNY Product Managers continuously worked with OneCity Health to determine needs, priorities, and enhancements to support improving user-experience, responding to new training initiatives, and adapt to unfolding data management and tracking needs. The HWNY development team utilized agile development methodology to ensure the OneCity Health Learning Management System was rapidly evolving and responding to the changing environment.
• Account Services
  • HWNY’s account service team, an extension of the OneCity Health team, makes day-to-day training operations possible. As experts in the HWapps technology, the account service team is continuously involved in the administration of new trainings, preparing of data reports, and ensuring that OneCity Health is meeting its short-term deliverables and deadlines.
• Customer Support
  • OneCity Health contracts HWNY to provide direct customer support to users across its entire network. Through official HWNY Support channels, employees can contact HWNY’s Support Team directly to get real-time assistance. HWNY utilizes a custom-designed ticketing system to address requests thoroughly and rapidly.