Implementing Competency Assessment Tools: Our Top 4 Tips for Your Team’s Success

Looking at implementing competency assessment tools that help your program run smoother? It’s a journey we’ve witnessed many health care organizations navigate. Here are our top 4 pieces of advice based on our experience. Use these to set up a seamless onboarding for assessment tools and to ensure you pick a platform that can support your needs well in the long run.

1. Digitize Your Competency Frameworks

A 2024 report estimated clinicians are spending around 28 hours per week on administrative tasks. And medical office staff are spending closer to 34 hours. 

Reducing administrative work where possible with the right digital tools is one of the best ways you can give time back to your team for other key tasks. Picking a platform like Creative Health Care Insight (CHCI) can make it easier to track employee progress, pull status updates on individuals or teams, and enable flexible learning.

How CHCI Supports Digitizing Competency Frameworks

Our Competency Suite is designed to be accessed on any secure web-enabled device, making it easy for both employees and preceptors to facilitate learning. Our platform supports any competency framework you choose. It’s also the only one on the market with exclusive rights to offer digital support for The Wright Competency Model™.

Additionally, because it’s digitizing your competency program, your team can more easily pull reporting. This is a huge win, especially if you need to collect verified data to achieve national designations like Magnet® or Pathway to Excellence®.

Benefits of digitizing your competency with CHCI include:

• Massive amounts of time and money saved in data collection, verification, and reporting (which can be automated with the Professional Portfolio Suite)
• Easier decision-making thanks to real-time reporting across individuals and teams
• Built-in support for any competency model of your choice

2. Consider the Employee Lifecycle

From onboarding employees to providing professional development for current staff, it’s important to implement competency assessment tools that can meet every employee where they are. 

Building the strongest team starts with each individual’s needs. Every employee has different experiences and skills gaps, which is why your managers and preceptors should have tools for health care staff evaluations that can be personalized.

How CHCI Can Enhance Team Performance With Assessments

A strong competency program goes a long way in building confidence among employees and improving patient outcomes. Within our Competency Suite, your preceptors can set goals both by person, team, and/or department. 

This allows for true customization of each individual’s professional development journey. Plus, it connects their progress to the overarching goals and objectives of your organization.

CHCI caters to all employees by including:

• Support for a traditional or a tiered orientation model
• The ability to create personalized learning paths that increase confidence and the quality of care
• Access to the Professional Portfolio Suite to help develop employees and retain them

3. Build In Flexibility

Past studies have shown potential links between longer shift times and burnout, leading to decreased patient care. Although a newer study looking at the difference between 8-hour and 12-hour shifts has confirmed that burnout rates are only slightly higher for longer shifts.

The results around burnout may be hard to measure across so many individual workers, personalities, and types of health care organizations, but this fact remains the same: there’s a lot that can happen in a shift for your employee. If you’re implementing competency assessment tools, they need to fit into the workflow of your employees’ busy shift schedules.

How CHCI Makes Competency Training Easier for Your Employees

With our platform, you’re able to give your staff more autonomy over how and what completing their training looks like. Preceptors can set expectations and goals, and individuals can take control over the steps to meet them. This, in turn, can increase employee morale and satisfaction in the development they’re getting from your organization.

CHCI makes competency work easier for employees with:

• Convenient access to competency learning across any web-enabled device
• A diverse range of assessment types for different types of learning (written, video, simulation, discussion, oral, reflective, and more)

4. Think About Every Level

Gallup finds that 80% of employees who receive meaningful feedback are engaged. Enhancing team performance with competency assessments should include touchpoints for commentary and insights. Doing so can help create a culture of constructive feedback.

Consider implementing competency assessment tools that support 360 reviews. Gathering input from different levels can give employees a fuller picture of their development, as well as help everyone feel heard and valued across your organization.

How CHCI Helps You Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement

We understand the value of collecting feedback and also how time-consuming implementing a 360 system can be. That’s why we’ve built the Peer Feedback Component in our Competency Suite. It can help you gather feedback with customized assessments including:

• Leadership teams
• Supervisors
• Teams
• Self-reflection

Ready To Start Implementing Competency Assessment Tools?

If you’re looking for a platform that can meet the needs of both your leadership teams and your employees, it’s time to explore CHCI. This powerful all-in-one platform offers you support with competency and much more.

It includes two suites: The Competency Suite and the Professional Portfolio Suite. In them, you’ll find components that help you set up a successful and smooth-operating competency program. But you’ll also have access to other key features that help with retaining employees, reducing administrative work, and saving your organization both time and money where it counts.