The Next Healthcare Workforce Challenge Isn’t Hiring. It’s Readiness.

Healthcare organizations spend significant time thinking about workforce capacity: Do we have enough people? Can we scale for the next enrollment period, seasonal surge, or change in demand?

Those questions matter. But they are not enough. A healthcare workforce can be fully staffed and still not be ready.

Today’s healthcare professionals navigate complex systems, changing workflows, privacy requirements, and specialized patient needs, often while helping someone anxious about medication, confused about benefits, or trying to access care.

Knowing the process is only the start. Professionals must apply it accurately while still listening, thinking critically, and responding with empathy.

As my colleague, Candy Perkins, often reminds our Education and Development team, “There’s a real person on the other end of every interaction.”

That experience has consequences. McKinsey found highly satisfied healthcare consumers were seven times more likely to return to the same provider and 35% less likely to cancel or miss appointments.

For healthcare leaders, the question is no longer simply whether the workforce has been trained.

The better question is: Has the workforce practiced the right things enough to be ready when difficult interactions occur?

Staffing meets demand. Readiness delivers quality.

Staffing creates capacity. Training creates knowledge. Practice creates readiness.

That last distinction matters in healthcare. Before someone handles a high-stress patient or member interaction, the process, systems and workflows need to become familiar enough that they are not consuming all of that person’s attention. I think of it as building muscle memory around the process, scripting and systems. The more those fundamentals have been practiced, the more cognitive capacity remains for listening, judgment, and emotional intelligence when the situation becomes difficult.

Research supports that principle. A 2024 umbrella review of 133 healthcare education studies found that realistic simulation improved performance, reinforcing the value of practice over instruction alone.

Effective preparation requires realistic scenarios, simulation, repetition and practice within actual workflows. The goal is not simply knowing the answer, but confidently applying it in a real human interaction.

Graduation is not readiness.

One of the biggest mistakes organizations can make is treating workforce education as something that ends when onboarding does.

I see the learning journey differently. It starts on day one, but it should continue well beyond the formal education period and into production. The first 30, 60 and 90 days provide leaders with something a classroom cannot: actual performance data.

Quality results, compliance performance, customer experience, proficiency, and observed interaction patterns begin showing us where professionals are confident and where they need additional support.

That creates a much stronger development cycle:

Learn → Practice → Perform → Measure → Coach → Practice again.

If a difficult interaction or new pattern begins appearing, we should not have to wait for a formal retraining cycle. We can turn it into a scenario, simulation or focused coaching opportunity and reinforce the capability while it matters.

Continuous education is not remediation. It is part of workforce readiness.

Flexibility is an education capability.

Healthcare demand does not stay constant. Open enrollment, seasonal peaks, program changes, and other events can create significant shifts in volume and service focus.

Organizations understandably want workforce flexibility in response. But flexibility cannot simply mean adding people. A workforce can only move as quickly as its capabilities allow.

Cross-training and progressive development create a different model. Professionals can establish proficiency in foundational work. Then, build additional capabilities in deliberate layers as they demonstrate readiness for more complex responsibilities.

That might mean progressing from member services and eligibility into benefits, claims or specialized support. It can also mean reactivating proven professionals for demand surges with targeted refreshers rather than starting from zero.

The most scalable workforce may not always be the one that can hire fastest. It may be the one that can develop and reactivate proven capability in the moment.

Measure readiness where it matters: performance.

Course completion is not the ultimate measure of readiness. Neither are attendance or hours spent in training. The proof is operational excellence.

Leaders should measure what matters: proficiency, quality, compliance, and customer experience. Then, identify the skills driving the best results.

In healthcare, experience and quality carry real weight. Medicare’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program withholds 2% of participating hospitals’ payments to fund value-based incentives, with patient experience among the measures used to evaluate performance.

The point is simple: Quality and experience have consequences well beyond the contact center. Readiness ultimately underpins the quality of an organization’s performance.

The next opportunity: Optimize the learning model itself.

As healthcare complexity continues to increase, leaders should rethink workforce education around three areas.

• First, optimize the objectives. Start with what success looks like operationally. Knowing that, work backward from key performance indicators to the skills and behaviors professionals need to demonstrate proficiently.
• Second, optimize the timeline. Education isn’t confined to the onboarding process. It’s ongoing. Developing agents throughout go- live and early production creates opportunities for education and training departments to coach teams based on real performance. This accelerates learning and helps agents become more proficient.
• Third, optimize for practice. Shift more of the learning experience from passive instruction toward application, repetition, and feedback.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can make the operational-excellence model even stronger.

A peer-reviewed Oxford study of more than 5,000 customer-support agents found AI-assisted workers, with roughly two months of tenure, performed at levels comparable to or better than non-assisted workers, with more than six months of experience.

The research was not healthcare-specific, but it offers a compelling view of AI’s potential to accelerate proficiency.

But I do not believe AI replaces the educator. AI will not take over the classroom, where person-to-person learning matters, and always will.

It can expand simulation, provide immediate feedback, personalize practice, and reinforce learning at scale. Human educators bring something different: The ability to recognize confusion, adapt an explanation, and understand what a learner needs in the moment.

The future of workforce education is not human or AI. It is how effectively we combine the educator, practice, and technology.

Readiness starts before the first patient interaction.

Healthcare workforce readiness cannot be something we declare at graduation. Because done right, learning is ongoing, gathering muscle memory, momentum and insight to serve in the moment.

It has to build through realistic practice. Strengthened through continuous development, and proven through operational performance.

That is the direction our Education and Engagement team continues to go as healthcare interactions, technology, and expectations evolve.

To succeed, the framework should be designed around a proven premise: Workforce readiness extends beyond staffing and onboarding. It actualizes and accelerates through continuous education, practice, and coaching.

For healthcare leaders, I ask this:

When a difficult patient or member interaction occurs, has your workforce simply completed its training?

Or have they practiced enough, and are they really ready to perform well?