Advisory Services
The health workforce is often the largest recurring expense and greatest chokepoint in hospitals and health systems. Yet many health systems in emerging markets are not managing their health workforce for maximum quality and efficiency. Hospital-based HR staff often don’t have the skills they need to effectively manage the complex needs of health workers. This results in poor patient outcomes, loss of revenue, missed opportunities, and higher operating risks. In order to help health systems perform at the peak of their potential, Corvus Health offers a variety of health workforce and human resource management services and prides itself in documenting the impact of its work. Corvus Health offers services to public and private clients in the North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Gulf States.
Health Workforce Recruitment, Staffing, and Locum Tenens
Health workers are a health facility’s most important asset. Vacancies of even a few days can compromise quality of care and result in tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Poorly fitting hires can lower team morale, productivity, and quality of care. When health facilities recruit for themselves, recruitment can often cost up to one year’s salary (in staff time, advertising costs, and lost productivity). In today’s rapidly changing markets it is beneficial to have a flexible workforce to scale up and down rapidly in response to market demands. Corvus Health offers recruitment, staffing, and locum tenens services to public and private clients throughout the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America.
Benefits of Corvus Health’s Recruitment, Staffing, and Locum Tenens Services:
Recruitment
Most countries are experiencing health worker shortages, making it difficult for health facilities to recruit the staff they need to provide a broad array of quality services. Recruitment can often take months and can delay the provision of services. Corvus Health uses its extensive national, regional, and global networks to hire the full spectrum of health workers for clients. Most health faculties have only local networks to recruit from whereas Corvus Health maintains a global database of health workers as well as long-term relationships with health professional schools and national, regional, and global health professional associations. Our systems allow health workers to submit paper applications or to apply via web or mobile phone. We offer an option of six month to one year guarantee periods in which we will replace the candidate if they don’t work out.
Onboarding
Once staff are hired, they must integrate successfully into the existing team. Many facilities skip the onboarding process or it takes too long to integrate new health workers onto the team. Corvus Health’s onboarding/induction training is based on defined competencies, helps workers develop expertise with your clinical pathways and procedures, explains your professional culture, and aligns institutional expectations and performance. Onboarding can be provided either in person or via eLearning so that that staff are performing at a high level as soon as possible.
Strategic Staffing
Corvus Health offers a variety of strategic staffing services for clinical and non-clinical workers, including:
Temporary Staffing (Locums Tenens): Sometimes staffing needs are only temporary, for example, to cover vacation, medical leave, or parental leave. Temporary staffing enables clients to continue to offer their services without interruption. We provide surge staffing during seasonal increases in patient volume (such as winter or rainy season). It may be impractical for hospitals to directly hire additional staff during these times. Temporary staffing enables our clients to save money by avoiding turnover due to burnout of permanent staff and decreases the need to pay overtime for regular, full-time employees. We offer options of transitioning temporary staff to permanent staff which give employers the chance to try out an employee before making a permanent offer of employment.
Specialty Staff Sharing: Highly skilled specialists such as interventional radiologists, cardiac surgeons, oncologists, neurologists, and orthopedic surgeons are in short supply in many countries. In addition, many hospitals do not have sufficient volume of patients to retain these specialists full-time. In order to address this challenge, Corvus Health provides access to highly skilled specialists on a regular, part-time basis. Depending on the country and situation, the specialist physicians and teams can be available on a weekly or monthly basis and can be available in person or via telemedicine. Corvus Health handles all licensing and credentialing of the staff.
Professional Employment Organization (PEO) Services: The health sector is growing increasingly complex and for many hospitals and health systems, there is no longer a strong business case to employ their staff directly. Health facilities and health systems can use Corvus Health’s PEO services so that Corvus Health hires and is the employer of record of their clinical and non-clinical workers. Employees are assigned to your company and trained to meet your company’s needs while giving you increased flexibility to expand and contract services in response to demand.
Health Cadres Covered
HR Staffing/Human Resource Management
Corvus Health can run your facilities’ HR departments, either through placing professional HR staff onsite, or for smaller facilities, providing TeleHR (telephone-based and web-based) services and support. Either way, your organization taps into our world class HR systems and knowledge so that your HR department is run as efficiently and professionally as possible. Our HR staff will manage every aspect of a health system’s health workforce: team design, determining staffing needs, salary bands and career paths, recruitment, onboarding, credentialing, performance management, support supervision, shift scheduling, quality assurance, benefits selection and management, retention, promotions, succession planning, payroll, in-service training, policy creation and enforcement, compliance, reporting, etc. Corvus Health uses its systems to provide metrics to hospital leadership so you can track progress.
Corvus Health Advantages
Corvus Health brings unpatrolled global experience in health workers recruitment and staffing. Unlike other recruiters who recruit across industries, Corvus Health is a health workforce expert and focuses solely on healthcare and knows the industry better than any other recruiter in emerging markets. We bring a global level of recruiting expertise that is impossible for individual health facilities or health systems to keep on staff.
Our global database enables us to recruit both active and passive potential candidates. Corvus Health can provide assistance in defining the job responsibilities and competencies and write the job description and help define the salary range and benefits package. Our strict screening process assures that you are provided with only the best applicants for you to choose from. We can free up your on-site HR staff to focus on immediately pressing issues and conduct credentialing if staff need to be brought in from outside the country.
Corvus Health can set up systems to provide a reliable stream of recruits for long term recruiting needs, such as for GCC countries or countries experiencing chronic structural health workforce shortages. Whether you just need a few staff recruited or are interested in complete Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), we can meet your needs.
Education and Training Services
Most countries and health facilities currently are challenged by shortages of health workers. In addition, health workers often do not have the competencies, knowledge, attitudes, and practices they need to deliver quality care. Corvus Health works with our clients to determine their education and training needs and deliver results cost-effectively.
Education and Training Principles
Corvus Health provides a wide variety of education and training to improve health workers’ performance and health facilities’ bottom line:
Pre-Service Education: Corvus Health can train frontline workers such as ultrasound techs and laboratory techs, medical secretaries, coders, and billers, on-site or in external facilities.
Post-Graduate Training: Corvus Health can provide post-graduate training for many professions, including nurses (e.g.: endoscopy nursing certification). We can also upgrade physicians’ skills, for example, training them in new surgical procedures or in the placement of new devices. Depending on the type of training required, the training can take place in your facility or another location. We can arrange for overseas training for courses not available in-country. Corvus Health can also establish and run fellowship programs.
In-Service Training: The field of medicine advances rapidly and health workers frequently need updates in order to provide a wide range of services at a high level of quality. Corvus Health offers face-to-face, eLearning, or blended learning on a wide variety of subjects including a broad range of customer service and soft skills, clinical care topics, quality improvement, and leadership and management skills. Courses can be custom designed to meet your organization’s needs. Corvus’ approach usually begins with an evaluation of learners’ needs and includes the development of plans to implement and evaluate the learning.
Continuous Professional Development: Corvus Health offers Continuous Professional Development training, approved by the relevant regulatory authority, to enable your clinicians to maintain their licenses.
Online and Distance Learning: Depending on the topic, many types of training can be offered online, via mobile phone (Interactive Voice Response/IVR, most appropriate for isolated, low-literacy health workers), DVD, tablet, and paper.
Mentoring: Staff in whom you would like to make a long term investment can be paired up with one of our mentors. Weekly phone calls from the mentor help the mentee problem solve, implement new learnings, network, and develop the confidence they need to rise to the next level of their career.
HR Management and Outsourced HR
Corvus Health can run your facilities’ HR departments, either through placing professional HR staff onsite, or for smaller facilities, providing outsourced HR (telephone-based and web-based) services and support. Either way, your organization taps into our world class HR systems and knowledge so that your HR department is run as efficiently and professionally as possible. Our HR staff will manage every aspect of a health system’s health workforce: team design, determining staffing needs, salary bands and career paths, recruitment, onboarding, credentialing, performance management, support supervision, separations shift scheduling, quality assurance, benefits selection and management, retention, promotions, succession planning, payroll, in-service training, policy creation and enforcement, compliance, reporting, etc. Corvus Health uses its systems to provide metrics to hospital leadership so you can track progress.
Health Professional Schools
Health professional schools are extremely complex institutions that function in a challenging regulatory and financial environment. It is essential to the success of local and global health professional labor markets that health professional schools be able to function as efficiently as possible and graduate sufficient numbers of fit-for-purpose professionals. School leaders and professors often don’t have the management and technical skills that they need to run their school as efficiently as possible. This results in low enrollments, high rates of student dropout, graduates who are not well suited for real life practice environments, mismatch between employers’ needs and health workers’ competencies, and missed opportunities. In order to help health professional schools perform at the peak of their potential, Corvus Health offers a variety of health professional school services and prides itself in documenting the impact of its work.
Advisory Services
Corvus Health offers advisory services to public and private health professional schools, including medical, nursing, pharmacy, health science/paraprofessional schools, and hospital management programs. These services include expert advice on any topic related to schools. We can improve admissions, reduce the cost per graduate, link schools to employers and to student loan systems, and help design bridge programs to enable schools to transition students from disadvantaged, medically-underserved communities into their courses. We can help schools fundraise and engage their alumni for mentoring, teaching, feedback, fundraising, and employment of new graduates.
Quality Improvement
Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Facilities: The field of healthcare advances rapidly and health professional schools often struggle to keep up. Corvus Health assists schools to update their curriculum and make it more relevant to local and regional markets. We can transition courses to online and blended learning, upgrade faculty’s pedagogy skills including case-based teaching, competency-based education, and “flipping the classroom” in which students watch taped lectures and spend more valuable time interacting dynamically with professors. We can help upgrade school facilities, such as the design of new classrooms and labs and the transition from physical to digital libraries.
Growth Planning
Most countries are not training enough health workers to meet basic needs. Corvus Health helps schools expand existing programs cost-effectively without compromising quality. Expansion may be on an existing campus or may use a hub and spoke model to reach out to rural communities and health facilities. We also assist schools to add new educational programs, and can help with curricula, pricing, enrollment estimates, and outreach to potential students and employers.
Accreditation and Twinning
Corvus Health can help schools achieve national or international accreditation. Our extensive network includes schools all over the world interested in twinning and joint certificates and degrees, including schools in the US and India.
Dropout Prevention
Some schools experience high rates of student dropout, effectively reducing the capacity of the school and compromising the school’s reputation and accreditation. Corvus Health can help address all causes of dropout (financial, academic, and social/personal) and ensure that all students who enter a school graduate as competent capable health workers.
Simulation Centers
Medical simulation is the cutting edge of competency-based health professional education. Corvus Health assists health professional schools to plan and set up simulation labs, purchase relevant mannequins and simulation systems, train simulation techs and professors, and create simulation case studies. We assist simulation labs to obtain accreditation by the US Society for Simulation in Healthcare.
Faculty Recruitment
Schools often cannot expand existing programs or offer new ones due to shortages of faculty and other staff. Corvus Health can help recruit new professors, create retention programs to retain existing faculty, and design faculty pipeline programs so that schools can develop their own sustainable stream of locally trained, relevant faculty. Corvus Health can also facilitate visiting and rotational faculty from other schools and countries.
Group Purchasing
The materials and equipment required by health professional schools tend to be very expensive. In order to reduce the costs for schools, Corvus Health organizes group purchasing of needed materials and equipment. This includes computers, teaching materials, laboratory equipment and reagents, simulation equipment, library materials, software, and a variety of electronic subscriptions.
Improved Management
Through no fault of their own, most health professional school deans have no formal management training. We use tools developed by Corvus Health staff to evaluate and improve the management of health professional schools across all key areas, including strategic planning, finances, faculty, student admissions and management, physical plant management, libraries and laboratories, curriculum, marketing, and stakeholder management.
Software
Corvus Health can advise health professional schools on software to track students and student performance, monitor the curriculum, and better manage the school’s resources.
Turnkey Schools
Corvus Health provides turnkey health professional school services. Similar to turnkey hospital services, we lead the entire process of starting a health professional school, including planning, regulatory approval, implementation, hiring, student admissions, and launch.
Health Professional Organizations
Health professional organizations (regulatory councils, professional associations, and unions) are vital to the proper functioning of health systems and to the advancement of healthcare. Yet these organizations must fulfill broad mandates using very limited resources. Corvus Health understands the specific needs and goals of health professional organizations and provides a variety of affordable services to these organizations to help them better carry out their mandates and serve their constituents.
Advisory Services & Strategic Planning
Corvus Health offers advisory services to health professional organizations on any needs they may have. We can help health professional organizations with strategic planning, new initiatives, the planned growth of the organization, and the services it offers its constituent.
Websites & Communications
One of the main roles of health professional organizations is outreach and communications with their constituents. Yet this is very difficult to manage on small budgets. Corvus Health has cost-effective website design and hosting for health professional organizations and can keep your website relevant and up to date. Corvus Health can also write, publish, and distribute newsletters and manage membership communications, listservs, and social media accounts. We can also assist with relationship management with decision makers important to your organization.
Constituent Services
Corvus Health can assist with software and services to manage your constituent services, including membership renewals, recertifications, online learning, online payments, automatic reminders, andcall centers, etc. Corvus Health can also help you leverage the power of the large numbers of your constituents and their influence by negotiating improved benefits such as lower rates on life insurance, health insurance, bank loans, and other benefits.
Improved Management
Corvus Health can help health professional organizations improve their management and day to day operations. We can benchmark progress against metrics including number of new constituents, number of constituents served, and budgetary goals.
Quality Improvement
Corvus Health can help improve the quality of care and patient safety at your facility through introducing Balanced Quality Scorecards. We help identify quality challenges and risks and perform the design, training, and implementation of a Balance Scorecard Team Performance Management System for your medical and nursing teams and other teams. We can also improve quality through the following activities.
Team and Workflow Planning
Corvus Health works with our clients to design how to most cost-effectively provide consistent, high-quality care. This involves designing the clinical and non-clinical teams,mapping how patients will move through the facility, who provides what services. Particular emphasis is placed on customer service, the customer experience, and the soft skills of health workers to provide patient-centered care. We ensure that high value, shortage professions have their productivity maximized and are retained.
Operational Plans and Hospital Management
Corvus Health works with its clients to provide Standard Operational Plans and Standard Operational Procedures for all the facility’s functions. We use Lean Six Sigma approaches to enable your teams to provide consistently high quality, cost-effective services. SOPs include infection control plans, operating theater scheduling and turnover plans, procurement and stocking plans, etc. We can also recruit experienced hospital managers for you.
Clinical Pathways
Clinical pathways (guidelines, maps) enable health care teams to provide consistent, high-quality care and have been proven in multiple studies to improve outcomes, decrease costs, and decrease lengths of stays and readmissions. They have the additional advantage of enabling nurses and other health workers to start the first stages of diagnoses and treatment based on thepatient’s symptoms before the physician can be contacted or can examine the patient. Corvus Health can develop clinical pathways for your facility’s most common or high-risk diagnosis and ensure they are properly adapted to your particular population.
Telemedicine
Corvus Health provides second opinion telemedicine services to health facilities worldwide. Arrange to have your physicians (or your patients joined by a provider) speak directly with your choice of a US or Indian board-certified specialist. Provider-to-provider email (“asynchronous”) consultations are available as well.