How Ochsner Health Grew Student Placements 10% in One Year While Reducing Staff Workloads

Ochsner Health, the largest non-profit academic healthcare system in Louisiana and Mississippi, set goals to expand its clinical workforce and retain quality professionals with a data-driven approach. They knew students who completed clinical placements in the Ochsner system could be a valuable source of future employees. Still, they faced the question of growing their placement program and systematically capturing and managing student information from placements to hiring.

The Student Placement Problem

To alleviate current and future workforce shortages, Ochsner Health knew it needed to address the challenges of efficiently and effectively placing students across its network of 45 hospitals and 370 health and urgent care centers.

“At the time, we struggled to understand our capacity across our numerous hospitals and offsite care centers. Lack of visibility made requesting and placing the optimum number of clinical placements challenging, and it was an administrative headache to coordinate with so many education partners,” said Sylvia Hartmann, Director of Nursing Academic Relations at Ochsner Health. Competing priorities often resulted in delays or missed opportunities for student placements.

Ultimately, strategic decision-making was complex without a centralized placement, communication, and data system. Ochsner needed effective tools for engaging, tracking, and recruiting students for future positions.

The InPlace Network Solution

Because every nursing student is crucial to the future healthcare workforce, Ochsner chose InPlace Network’s solution to help them achieve their growth and efficiency goals: 

• Strengthening Educational Partnerships: Foster stronger connections with relevant educational institutions. 
• Program Growth: Encourage growth through strategic engagement and collaboration with educational partners. 
• Workforce Development: Address present and future workforce shortages by recruiting students who completed clinical placements within their system. 

 “InPlace Network was the clear choice as we looked to implement a solution. Having one centralized system for all stakeholders has allowed us to streamline our processes, gain capacity and placement visibility, and relay shared data much easier,” shared Sylvia Hartmann.

Since implementing InPlace Network in 2020, Ochsner has consolidated eight disparate systems into one solution. It now has proactive, real-time clinical placement planning and management, enhanced onboarding capabilities for staff and education partner engagement, and a centralized repository for accessible data and regulatory information. InPlace’s integrated solution enabled the flow of data between student placement management and HR systems to support ease of badging setup, recruitment engagement, and tracking for employment conversion. Survey instruments are used to report on feedback from students and instructors.

Success for Ochsner Health

Since implementing InPlace Network in 2020, Ochsner Health has seen measurable improvements to its placement, capacity, and hiring processes.   With InPlace’s powerful platform, Ochsner Health saw:

Higher Engagement and Improved Partnership Satisfaction

Over 5,000 students and educators engaged using InPlace Network’s tools, improving their evaluation processes.  Ochsner’s academic partnerships flourished with InPlace’s real-time data on capacity, placements, and experience surveys, effectively addressing workforce shortages.

Efficient Onboarding and Data-Driven Decisions Supporting Program Growth  

Onboarding time was reduced by 85%, enhancing consistency.  The use of real-time data on capacity and placements supported strategic decision-making.  Technology and educational partnerships expanded programs, leading to a nearly 100-fold increase in student intake.

Increase in Placements and Hiring Volume 

InPlace Network supported a 10% increase in placements and a 14% increase in unique students from 2022 to 2023.  The rise in clinical placements at Ochsner led to an increase in student hires, strengthening their workforce.

“InPlace Network has allowed us to think beyond student placements and capacity. We now have the bandwidth and tools to plan for the future of Ochsner Health and ensure we will have the workforce to support our needs and growth.” – Sylvia Hartmann, Ochsner Health.