Hanna Patterson |
As healthcare providers contend with acute labor shortages and rising cost pressures, two leading organizations in the sector — Wellstar Health System and Bon Secours Mercy Health — are showing what’s possible when learning and career mobility are embedded in business strategy.
During a candid webinar conversation last week, Laura Dannels, chief talent officer at Wellstar, and Levi Loverkamp, chief workforce planning officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health, shared how they’re each building scalable talent pipelines — anchored in ROI, backed by data, and fully aligned with their organization’s top priorities.
Here’s what we heard, and what it means for the future of talent strategy in healthcare:
1. Workforce development = business infrastructure.
Though they lead different organizations, Dannels and Loverkamp share a core belief: Workforce development is no longer just a perk but a mission-critical capability for patient care and business resiliency.
“We see career care as truly a business imperative,” Dannels said. “This is a societal-, organizational-, and individual-level challenge that we are trying to solve, and we’re doing that by upending what has been traditional education benefits and really thinking about this in a much more strategic way.”
Loverkamp added: “We’ve realized that it’s no longer an option to have a strategy around growing our associates within. It’s a requirement. It's a necessity of operating and serving our communities today.”
While many talk about aligning talent development with business outcomes, Dannels and Loverkamp put that principle into practice, drawing direct links between learning investments and operational metrics including vacancy duration, contract labor spend, and clinical throughput.
“If you don’t have the revenue-generating roles, like imaging staff, you’re not going to see the financial impact of your organization,” Dannels explained.
Dannels and Loverkamp’s experiences exemplify a key finding from recent Guild research. According to the study of 500 CHROs and L&D leaders, those who align learning with their organization’s top priorities are significantly more likely to drive organizational results. In healthcare in particular, the highest-performing leaders connected learning initiatives to quality of care, patient satisfaction, and regulatory compliance, which are all core drivers of organizational performance.
Case study: When hiring fell short, Wellstar built a better way to grow talent
The Problem: Georgia ranks 49th in healthcare workforce availability, and Wellstar faced increasing difficulty meeting patient-care demands through traditional hiring. Many frontline employees lacked visibility into career pathways, and tuition-reimbursement models favored higher-income employees, leaving talent untapped.The Solution: Wellstar launched “Career Care,” a system-wide initiative treating workforce development as core infrastructure. The program includes guaranteed placement, internal career navigation, community wraparound support (e.g., child care and Wi-Fi access), and partnerships with local and national education providers. Employees are paid during applied learning and supported through stackable credentials and guided advancement.
The Results: Roughly 800 employees are currently enrolled in Career Care pathways. Predictive pipelines have been established for high-vacancy roles like surgical techs. Early indicators show stronger retention and advancement rates for those developed internally. The program is now integrated into Wellstar’s board-level strategy and philanthropic outreach, including support from Microsoft, UPS, and Georgia Power.
2. HR must speak the language of the CFO.
To Dannels and Loverkamp, speaking the language of the CFO — e.g., using data to show cost avoidance, labor savings, ROI, and more — is what elevates talent development from HR activity to strategic business driver.
To make this shift, they both stressed, HR leaders must eschew classic HR jargon. “I don’t know that HR always speaks the language of the business in such a way that it’s compelling to a CFO or to CEO or president,” Loverkamp said.
To be sure, the challenge with implementing education and mobility programs has been the difficulty in quantifying the impacts on organizational performance. Yet for Bon Secours Mercy Health and Wellstar, making ROI both measurable, visible, and easy to understand has been instrumental in not only successfully launching new programs, but in continually optimizing them. “Each year we’re able to ask: What are we getting from this investment? Where should we double down? What needs are emerging from our workforce and clinical operations? And what are employees most focused on?”
“There’s ROI in everything we’re doing with our education strategy, and we measure it regularly, often more than once a year,” Loverkamp added. “When you factor in premium labor costs like agency fees or bonuses, it’s clear that investing in the growth of our internal workforce delivers a strong return.”
Guild partners have seen similar impressive results. For example, nurses enrolled in Guild programs average 50% lower turnover rates, and one employer saved an estimated $100 million by avoiding over 300,000 contract shifts through internal development alone.
3. Strategic workforce planning is emerging as a competitive advantage.
As uncertainty grows, Dannels and Loverkamp see strategic workforce planning as essential to both business resilience and competitive advantage.
“I see it [workforce planning] not just as preparing for today’s roles,” said Loverkamp, “but as collaborating with operators to understand evolving care models and co-designing the workforce to support them. That kind of mindset and structure is essential, not just for where we are now, but for where we need to go next.” At Bon Secours Mercy Health, that mindset translates into technology-enabled forecasting and early pipeline development for future-critical roles.
Dannels, for her part, frames workforce planning as a key part of HR’s broader evolution into a data-driven, operationally fluent function. “This is part of the larger transformation in HR to really understand the business, use data effectively, and speak the language of operators,” she said.
She noted that industries like pharmaceuticals have long embraced strategic workforce planning out of necessity, given their innovation cycles. In contrast, healthcare providers are only now catching up, largely because many HR leaders have built their careers inside the system.
“Historically, healthcare hasn’t been as sophisticated in how we approach workforce strategy,” she said. “But now, strategic workforce planning is rising to the top of CHRO priorities — and for good reason.”
Encouragingly, she added, healthcare may now be leading the way. “The industry is actually pushing forward in this space more aggressively than others,” Dannels said.
Case study: How strategic workforce planning helped Bon Secours address the nursing shortage
The Problem: Traditional workforce models relied on external hiring, expensive contract labor, and tuition-reimbursement structures that excluded lower-wage workers. Talent shortages in frontline roles — especially nursing — threatened operational continuity and increased costs.The Solution: Bon Secours Mercy Health built a new workforce strategy grounded in strategic workforce planning and predictive analytics. Through a partnership with Guild, the organization shifted from reimbursing education to fully funding high-priority roles, even for PRN (or as needed) workers. The program was supported by coaches, self-navigation tools, and metrics shared with clinical and financial leaders.
The Results: A 20% increase in internal RN hires in 18 months. The top-three reasons cited by clinicians for choosing Bon Secours Mercy Health is now education benefits and career development. Estimated cost savings through reduced contract labor and turnover. Clear ROI metrics tied to business performance are now used to adjust and prioritize annually.
4. Wraparound support is critical to translating opportunity into outcomes.
Career pathways only work if employees can access them. Both leaders emphasized the importance of supportive infrastructure, ranging from career coaches to financial assistance to flexibility in work schedules.
“You can’t ask someone to develop skills if they’re losing income while doing it,” Dannels pointed out.
To support Bon Secours Mercy Health’s people, Lovercamp’s team built a custom career exploration tool and hired internal coaches to help workers match their interests with roles the system actually needs.
And Wellstar, in addition to coaching and other wraparound support, uses a model called “Career Care Plans,” designed like clinical pathways to help employees understand every step from entry-level to high-demand clinical roles.
