January 20, 2025: Sarah Richardson and Kate Gamble explore how high schools are transforming the future of healthcare careers amid workforce shortages. What role do partnerships between healthcare systems and educational institutions play in shaping the next generation of medical and IT professionals? As workforce challenges persist, what lessons can leaders draw from these groundbreaking collaborations to address gaps in staffing and prepare for an evolving industry landscape?
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Today in Health IT, we are discussing high schools boost amid workforce shortage.
My name is Sarah Richardson. I'm a former CIO for several health companies. Care systems, most notably within HCA and Optum, and now president of the This Week Health 229 Executive Development Community, where we host a set of channels and events dedicated to transforming healthcare one connection at a time.
Today's episode is brought to you by Chrome OS. Imagine a healthcare system where technology works seamlessly in the background, keeping your data secure, your teams connected, and your patients at the center of care. Visit ThisWeekHealth. com, Google Chrome OS to learn more. And I am joined by Kate Gamble, Managing Editor here at This Week Health.
Kate, welcome to the show. Thank you, Sarah. I love that you found this article because when I saw High Schools Boost Healthcare Career Pathways Amid Workforce Shortage and started reading all of the particulars about what these organizations are performing and providing for these kids, I'm like, I wanted that when I was in high school.
You think about the fact they're increasingly collaborating with high schools to establish structured pathways into healthcare careers, addressing workforce shortages and enhancing community health education. Over 13 major healthcare systems have partnered with high schools through a 250 million initiative funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
These are aiming to provide students with early exposure to medical professions and combining academic curricula with practical training to prepare them for future roles in health care. These initiatives are part of a broader trend to invest in the next generation of health care workers, ensuring skilled workforce to meet the industry's evolving demands.
Kate, CIO, what are you doing with this information? I absolutely love
this. I think this is an untapped resource. I remember speaking with Cletus Earle a few years ago when he was with Collider Health, and he talked about efforts in the Buffalo area. To get high school students into coding and cybersecurity.
And he pointed out that a lot of people just don't know these careers exist, especially high school kids. So why not introduce them and build interest? And so to see this start to pick up is really encouraging. more than a dozen health systems have developed educational partnerships with high schools ranging from introductory courses that offer shadowing and hands on training to certification programs and internships and even healthcare tracks.
So for CIOs, there's a few implications and one of which The obvious one probably is workforce development. So early engagement in education can cultivate a pipeline of tech savvy professionals familiar with emerging health IT systems. And there's also community engagement. You're collaborating with educational institutions can enhance the health system's presence and reputation within the community.
And innovation, by introducing students to health IT concepts early on, that can foster innovative thinking and future advancements in healthcare technology, and some of the examples used are so intriguing to me. has Grow Your Own Medical Staff program. which allows high school seniors, to shadow physicians at the hospital.
AdventHealth University launched a program, Healthcare High School, which had an inaugural class of 142 students, 37 staff mentors. This is just such a good idea. And it's not just CIOs. Obviously, there's implications for the industry as a whole.
And consider that students can be certified as medical billing specialists, office administrative specialists, electronic health record specialists, medical scribes, health unit coordinators, pharmacy techs.
These aren't roles that they are training these kids for just to be these frontline workers. These have career paths and career ladders. When you start to introduce that perspective to these kids at that age, it's pretty incredible. Heck, even Memorial Hermann in Houston, part of their program, students earn 15 to 24 dual college credits and work towards a certification in their chosen pathway.
Here's what I love. They also have committed to hiring any student who wants to work for them. And in Cleveland, MetroHealth, they've got this program. Year round, students, 25 percent of their students graduate with a professional certification. We keep hearing more and more about is college the right answer for people right out of high school, the cost of student debt, or the hustle to get into a college of choice.
You may decide to go to college, you may decide to use this to boost towards a medical degree, or you may decide to have a meaningful career in healthcare while you're deciding. What you want to do next. This addresses staffing shortages. We know that these proactive educational initiatives can mitigate future workforce deficits.
This is both clinical and IT in nature. The diversity and inclusion factor. When we've got an engaged and diverse student population, it's going to promote inclusivity within healthcare workforce and give them an additional lens of what they're seeing happening within their communities. And I love the main aspect of enhanced patient care.
These well prepared and technologically adept workforce candidates can lead to improved patient outcomes and operational efficiency. We're always talking about how hard it is to navigate healthcare. If we are continuing to teach kids in high school and maybe even before them in some of these STEM programs what it means to be a healthcare professional, imagine how their experiences in navigating this system are different than what we are experiencing today.
Yeah, exactly. And what's interesting is that in recent years, I've heard more about high schools having programs for physical therapy and professions, that are similar to that. And why not health IT? Why not cybersecurity? Why not all of these fields? One of the Cleveland Clinic programs called Aspire Pathways.
It's a 12 week program for students to learn about careers in respiratory therapy, sterile processing, and surgical technology. This is not on the radar for a lot of people, and yet I could see as a high school kid wanting to learn about it, wanting to see if it's a viable pathway.
You mentioned that if the, if they had these before you would have been interested. I'm seeing now communications as a high school track. I would have been there. I would have applied to that. There's a lot of upside to this.
I don't see a downside. It's a way to showcase what's available and, drive interest.
I don't see the downside either, especially with the expectation about college. I'll go back to that because there's that space that says, hey, you know what, you graduate from high school, you go to college. You don't always know exactly what you want to do, and half the time you're choosing a major.
Based on what you think is interesting, and then you probably change it anyway. I always love asking people, what are you doing for a career? What you went to school for? I don't know that really anybody other than a lawyer, maybe a doctor says yes. And when you get that diversification of education and perspective, it's tremendous.
A hospital or a healthcare organization has so many aspects of the workforce. It's not just all clinical in nature. You may choose to go into IT. You may choose to go into facilities management. You may choose a path that is clinically adjacent. And when you can run these major organizations, especially from an operational perspective, layering in the cyber perspectives, layering in what it takes to have workflow management and data and understanding all these aspects, financial implications, your career path could take so many different journeys just from seeing it.
at that point in your education and in your life.
Yeah, for sure. So if you are a leader and you're interested in something like this, I would reach out to someone at Ohio Health or Cleveland Clinic or Memorial Hermann and find out what they're doing and what results they've seen. Because, this workforce shortage isn't going away anytime soon.
And this seems like a really great way to. Hopefully it put a dent in that.
It does. And it comes down to program structures, long term impact, scalability. There are so many different ways to get kids involved. And we say kids, and honestly, when you're a high school student, you're already on that journey towards adulthood.
And yet, let's be honest, it's hard to make decisions at 18 with what you want to do with the rest of your life. And so I'm grateful that we're starting to see these options out there. Thanks again for sharing this perspective. And I know it's something we will touch on throughout the year. Remember to share this 📍 podcast with a friend or a colleague.
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