Leveraging Human Capital Supply Chains in Healthcare Staffing

Guest Post by: Tim Giehll - CEO, Bond Talent US and the co-author of “Human Capital Supply Chains."

The Healthcare staffing industry has always had its ups and downs over the past few years and with revolutionary healthcare legislation on the horizon, it is hard to know how to plan for the future.  Aside from the whole legislative uproar, we do know 3 important facts that the Healthcare staffing industry needs to prepare for, starting today:

1. As the Baby Boomer Generation eventually retires (even though the recession has delayed some retirement plans), there will be a lot more elderly people for the us (society) to take care. 
2. The “supply” of doctors and nurses will not be able to keep up with the “demands” of this retiring BB generation.
3. As we recruit and train more healthcare professionals, we also need to find new ways for the Healthcare industry to become MORE PRODUCTIVE!!  For all the talk about electronic medical records, that alone will NOT be enough to rebalance our “supply” of healthcare professionals with the “demand” for healthcare services.   

This is where the concept of  human capital supply chains comes into the picture to help save the day.  

Corporations have been building and optimizing manufacturing supply chains for over three decades. Companies like Dell and Wal-Mart are famous for leveraging supply chain management techniques and technologies to better streamline supply with demand. It’s time to refocus the Healthcare industry and apply the lessons learned from optimizing production lines to optimizing our Healthcare workforce and processes. Building a just-in-time human capital supply chain is a big commitment, but one with the potential for big cost savings.

But how do healthcare organizations get their arms around their total human capital spending and estimate the value of implementing a human capital supply chain? My new book, Human Capital Supply Chains, provides the practical steps of designing and implementing your own human capital supply chain. The book is structured as a “How To” handbook for implementing and managing the new processes, technologies and organizational roles that are required to create a successful human capital supply chain. As we learned in manufacturing, establishing and managing a supply chain not only reduces costs in the short-term, but the long-term tuning of the supply chain can result in strategic advantages, advantages that will define the most successful companies across industries in the years to come.

Tim Giehll is the CEO of Bond Talent US and the co-author of “Human Capital Supply Chains” with The Code Works CEO Sara Moss. Tim lives in the Minneapolis are and can be contacted at [email protected].