Workforce Planning & Development in Times of Delivery System Transformation: The Stories of Kaiser Permanente and Montefiore Health System

As the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) advances, many health systems are taking bold measures to reorganize how they deliver care, and finding that in order to do so; they need to make major changes in how their healthcare workforces are organized.Understanding what workforce changes are occurring and how they are being managed is important not just for healthcare leaders, but for policymakers as well. Traditional methods of projecting provider shortages and justifying the allocation of public funding to expand various professional pipelines are giving way to the notion that there are many models of care delivery and that they have vastly different staffing configurations. Choices about staffing can have enormous implications for productivity, making assumptions about the demand for certain health professions a moving target.The authors focused on two very different health systems, Kaiser Permanente and Montefiore Health System, to better understand how diverse organizations are adapting to and planning for workforce changes in the post-ACA environment. They set out to examine not only how changes in healthcare delivery will alter the national demand for health workers, but also how individual organizations make choices about ways to reconfigure their workforce, and, ultimately, what kinds of local, state and federal policies will be most supportive of workforce transformations that advance both workers’ wellbeing and the value of their services