IHA has successfully worked with the senior management and human resources departments at hospitals, nursing homes and home care agencies across New York State on a variety of workforce recruitment, retention, and training initiatives. Through IHA’s portfolio of Survey Solutions annual salary surveys, workforce shortage surveys, quarterly “hot jobs” surveys tracking vacancies in difficult to fill positions, regional workforce benchmarking reports/statistics, and access to grant funds, IHA works with State agencies (DOH, DOL, SED, OTDA) on educational programs and efforts related to healthcare workforce development.

IHA has linked with local departments of social services, workforce investment boards, colleges and universities, and Area Health Education Centers. Through a series of specific projects, including the TANF 200% Health Worker Training Initiative and HCRA Health Worker Retraining Initiatives, IHA has partnered with almost 80 member and non-member facilities including hospitals, nursing homes, and home care agencies. IHA has collaborated with approximately 46 educational partners and over 75 local departments of social services, workforce boards, employment centers, and other agencies from 40 counties. By establishing these partnerships and collaborations, IHA has been able to:

• Recruit
• Train
• Offer support such as remediation
• Prerequisite courses
• Assessment for job readiness
• Training and post-training
• Employee mentoring services

IHA has provided many quality education programs over the years, and has executed its mission of delivering quality health-related education through training grants via programming in the areas of worker upgrade training, nursing, technicians, multi-skilled workers, medical records, and other high demand health professions. Successes of IHA’s delivery of grant-funded programs include:

• Administration of over $24M in grant awards over the past 17 years with no state disallowances or audit findings;
• Over 3,000 individuals from Upstate NY counties have sought career information, training and job placement through our TANF-funded programs;
• 1,500 individuals have been certified TANF 200%–eligible and received services;
• More than 1,500 individuals have received grant funding and or education and training services through HCRA funding;
• Establishing relationships with 46 different colleges and health training facilities;
• Provided outplacement and career training services to over 600 Berger impacted workers.

IHA has partnered with HealthStream, the leading provider of online health care education in the nation, to offer online training.  Over half of the nation’s hospitals, representing approximately 3.85 million healthcare professionals, use HealthStream. The breadth of their course offerings covers health care workers in acute care, post-acute care, home health, ambulatory care, physician practice and other care settings. HealthStream offers a centralized training platform, a library with hundreds of courses, and a leading-edge data and analytics platform to measure results. The HealthStream Learning Center (HLC) is a centralized learning platform, which is used to register learners, distribute on-line courseware, track classroom training activities, run completion reports, and much more.