Long Term Care Workforce Investment Organization (WIO)
The NYS Department of Health extended funding to WIO programs for an additional year, through March of 2022. This has allowed IHA WIO to continue providing free online training and recruitment and retention services to long term care facilities in New York state.
Since its inception, IHA WIO has trained over 17,000 long term care workers using the IHA WIO provided courses through its partnership with HealthStream. IHA WIO has also provided close to 4,000 google chrome books to employees in order to enable access to needed technology so workers could easily engage with an on-line learning system.
The grant extension has also supported another round of marketing for the Caring Gene® recruitment campaign. Beginning in September 2021, the campaign was put back in market across the state with creative digital ads that work to change the perception of long-term care and recruit new workers to the industry. Ads direct interested parties to www.caringgene.com, a site that lists jobs available in long term care throughout the State. To date, the website has received over 1.8 million visitors. Since September, when the website was upgraded to allow for on line applications, over 1,300 application for positions in long term care have been received.
The newest campaign is also using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to optimize the potential reach of the Caring Gene®. Using a set of data collected from caringgene.com and previous campaigns, AI is able to identify people who have the Caring Gene®. Once those individuals are identified, the campaign can more effectively reach them with ads that speak to their innate desire to care.
The newly proposed NYS Medicaid 1115 Waiver Concept paper included a possible extension of WIO funding to include the acute care sector. If funding becomes available, IHA is readily available to broaden existing programs to aid acute care recruitment and retention.