February 5, 2025: Sarah and Kate dive into how Intermountain Health’s St. Joseph Hospital successfully revamped its nurse mentoring program to increase retention rates to 97%. By shifting from a one-on-one model to structured group mentoring, this initiative fostered peer support, reduced burnout, and leveraged technology for scalable workforce development.
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today in health IT. We're discussing intermountain boosts nurse retention through group mentoring. My name is Kate Gamble. I'm managing editor at This Week Health, 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 backslash Google Chrome OS to learn more. Today we're talking about Intermountain's efforts to boost nurse retention with group mentoring, and I'm joined by Sarah Richardson, President of Community Development.
e a nursing focused story. In:This approach fostered peer support. Reduced isolation among new nurses and led to a significant increase in retention rates, reaching 97%. The program's success is attributed to the creation of support teams that encourage professional growth and provide guidance throughout nurses careers. So clearly some really big benefits, some big potential with this.
What does this mean for the CIO's perspective? What is it that, that really struck you about this story? What struck me about this story is what, even on our summit last week that you and I heard so much of, and even at the city tour dinners we're hosting this week, staffing remains a challenge for all aspects of.
Healthcare organizations and CIOs. They play a pivotal role in supporting initiatives that enhance staff retention and satisfaction, whether this is implementing and managing technological infrastructure for mentoring programs, such as scheduling systems, communication platforms, data analytics to monitor the program effectiveness that falls within the CIOs purview.
It can also become a component of one of the errors in the quiver for the CIO. Facilitating these programs, you contribute to a more stable and satisfied nursing workforce, which is essential for maintaining high quality patient care. These tactics could also be used within IT or other organizations.
And what I love about IT is that we're always an aggregator, and that if we're doing this for nursing, can and how would it be applied to other parts of the organization? So their group mentoring program, while 97 percent nurse retention rate, that shows why Structured peer support is important, how it folds into professional development, leadership engagement, and more importantly, addressing staff shortages, which are often leading to burnout.
We're seeing that again across the continuum in healthcare. So if you've got the ability to explore scalable, data driven, technology enhanced mentorship models that are improving retention, satisfaction, and performance, it's a win across the board. Perhaps for them, the nurses were the place to start. It was where it was felt most acutely.
Imagine if you start rolling this out to other parts of the organization. Yeah, that's a great point. This has a lot of potential in different areas. And if we look at the technology, the technological aspect digital platforms, things like apps, virtual meeting platforms, and AI driven matching systems, these can enhance the mentor mentee relationships.
Digital tools can also help track mentorship, engagement, and progress by using, analytics dashboards to measure interactions, sorry, to mention, to measure interaction frequency, career growth, and satisfaction.
looking at some of those challenges. When you're implementing tech driven mentorship programs, do hospitals struggle with I, with adoption, IT security or integration into existing workforce systems, all of these things need to be taken into consideration. And when we have these mentoring programs, how do they integrate with the EHR or the clinical workflow platforms to allow mentors to track the progress and competencies in real time and really see, what this program is doing.
And if you're going to scale that across the health system, Intermountain, this is one hospital in the mix of how many that they have. So if Mentoring needs are going to differ slightly in academic medical centers, rural hospitals, ambulatory care settings in the mix that many of these health systems have today.
It's how easy can you replicate what you're creating so that the burden of maintaining it doesn't get greater and greater. Because again, All things IT, you put it in somewhere, it has to be maintained, and ideally you can scale it effectively. And that's where you start having conversations about standardization with customization.
Should all facilities follow uniform mentoring structure? And is there any regionality that may be considered in it? And that also goes into nurse, educating professional development, staff, clinical leaders, serving as mentors, like who makes sense in the program. And think about the hospital culture across geographically dispersed teams.
The virtual mentoring program can also bridge a gap for remote or traveling nurses. And we've even seen a win from UC health. And I think a lot of these things are coming out of Denver. Was the virtual training program put in place by their system as well. So imagine if you've got virtual training for a whole, all of your teams, and you've also these mentoring programs, these are two different healthcare systems, but you learn and you borrow ideas from one another.
That starts to set up a pretty important space for measuring the impact of mentorship on retention and performance.
And in terms of measuring the impact key performance indicators can look at things like retention rates, engagement metrics, time to competency, and patient satisfaction scores. analytics plays a role too, using AI driven early warning systems to identify at risk nurses based on engagement, workload, and burnout indicators.
And then And in terms of integrating the mentoring data into the enterprise workforce planning, that's also an option to be able to tell,
sorry, start over.
And you have to look at integrating the mentoring data into the enterprise workforce planning. Would a single dashboard for HR nursing leadership and IT improve decision makings? And you need to look at correlating mentorship success with improved patient outcomes. Do the nurses who feel more supported perform better?
Inpatient interactions and safety adherence, that's that can be some pretty powerful information. So you want to have a good handle on that agree and thinking about building the future of nursing leadership. How do you structure it as a leadership pipeline? Is it a program you can identify and prepare nurses for leadership roles?
I'm going to say yes, absolutely. And that cross functional collaboration becomes a win across the board when you've got. Mentorship and the ability to engage with interdisciplinary teams. They may want to pursue advanced practitioner roles. And if you've got a formal mentorship requirement for new hires and promotions, then it's almost like having a coach or a buddy assigned to you.
When you first joined an order, you first get promoted. I'm a big fan of saying to people having a coach assigned to a person when they're struggling is too late. It can be helpful. Every time you promote somebody or every time there are handed a set of new responsibilities, whether you've got a formal coach or your mentor or somebody within your organization, help them along with those new expectations, because that's going to help you transition into different roles organizationally as well.
Lots of nurses want to go into non clinical roles or roles that allow them to keep a clinical lens with the organization, but informatics, patient advocacy, administrative leadership. All, truly, when your clinical analysts have been clinicians in your facility or somewhere else, they have a completely different view and it's such a retention factor for the nurses that they are serving as well because they've been in their shoes before.
And the other component that we really have to touch on is equity and inclusion, and you want to make sure that you're looking at the unique challenges of minority and internationally trained nursing, trained nurses, and whether mentorship programs are supporting culturally diverse staff. You need to look at, what strategies can ensure that mentorship equity across genders and underrepresented groups, and what role technology can play in removing the unconscious bias in mentor mentee pairing.
And then finally, should mentorship programs include mental health and resilience training? I think That's a no brainer, need to make sure nurses are receiving emotional support, work life balance strategies, and stress management coaching. So as we absorb all of this, what we're really seeing is that as nursing shortages, burnout, and workforce instability continue to challenge healthcare systems, having structured mentorship programs can prove to be a powerful tool in retaining talent.
Building leadership pipelines and enhancing patient care quality. So whether you're a CIO, CNO, HR executive, all of these leaders need to collaborate to design scalable, technology driven, and data backed mentorship models. that can foster resilient, engaged nursing teams. Yes, and that will cascade into other parts of the organization.
Back to your point, should mentorship programs include mental health and resilience training? Yes, everyone should have a sense of just understanding the resilience component of what it means to do what you do every day. You and I touch often, we run 24 7, 365 shops. It can't be game time all the time. And If you're mentoring people effectively across any continuum in your healthcare system, that resilience, that mental health, that work life bounce strategy is going to come into play.
That's good for everybody in your organization. Agreed. So this was a case study, as we said, limited to one organization, but really shows a lot of potential and is something that can be applied across the board. So don't forget, share this podcast with a friend or colleague. Use it as a foundation for daily or weekly discussions on the topics 📍 that are relevant to you and the industry.
They can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Sarah, thank you for joining, and thanks to everyone for listening. That's a wrap. Ta da!