Schedule

The MGMA Focus | Staffing Conference presents a curated lineup of rigorously evaluated human resources management and staffing content that is solution-oriented and targeted at addressing the most significant challenges in healthcare today. Gain insights from experts across various session formats, including interactive sessions, lectures and more.

Thursday, August 15

7:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Registration Open

8:30 - 9:30 AM

Breakfast

9:30 - 10:00 AM

New England Meet-up Hosted by Vermont/New Hampshire, Massachusetts/Rhode Island, and Maine MGMA

Join fellow attendees to foster connections and discuss the benefits of State and Local MGMA memberships.

10:00 - 11:00 AM

Navigating Staffing Challenges with Fellow Attendees

Eligible for: ACMPE: 1 | CEU: 1
Interactive | Basic | Comprehension
Operational Excellence

Moderators: Craig Wiberg, MLS, MBA, Senior Manager, Digital Events, MGMA

David Pennington, Chief Executive Officer, Collaborative Patient Care Group

Kick off the conference by joining fellow attendees to discuss key staffing challenges in the industry. Participants will join roundtables organized by state and topical interests to help them make meaningful connections. The moderated networking session will start with four key questions to start the discussion and foster problem-solving with for staffing challenges.

Learning objectives:

Discuss key challenges facing healthcare organizations
Share solutions with fellow healthcare executives

11:00 – 11:15 AM

Passing Break

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM

MS1: People First: The Best Medicine for Healthcare’s Staffing Challenges

Speaker: Amy Lafko, MSPT, MBA, Keynote Speaker, Author, and Chief Executive Officer, Carin Consulting Solutions; Independent Consultant, MGMA

There is no magic pill or instant fix for staffing challenges — but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer. Join Amy Lafko as she reveals the People First method — a roadmap designed to transform every phase of the employee lifecycle. Discover why the success of practices depends on both skilled leaders and well-designed systems to support their people.

With humor and storytelling from her personal and professional experience, Amy shares tangible systems, strategies and tools that will support leaders on their quest for employee engagement that drives their business imperatives.

Learning objectives:

Utilize the People First Method to examine the phases of the employee lifecycle
Create a roadmap for your employee journey that will boost engagement and retention
Establish priorities for your team’s success

12:15 - 1:45 PM

Lunch and Networking

Practice Management Lunch Meet-up - Hosted by Vermont/New Hampshire and Maine MGMA

Join fellow healthcare executives for lunch to discuss current practice management issues and foster connections. This session provides a platform to share best practices and collaborate on solutions to the unique challenges faced by healthcare providers. Strengthen your professional network and contribute to the collective efforts to improve healthcare.

1:45 - 2:45 PM

CON101: Driving Change: Lean Collaboration in Physician-Allied Health Teams

Speakers: Michelle Nordland, MAOL, Manager, Value Creation, Mayo Clinic

Eric Reeve, Operations Administrator, Mayo Clinic

Healthcare outcomes and operational efficiency can significantly improve when physicians and allied health team members shift from seeing themselves as separate entities to working collaboratively within the healthcare system. Incorporating Lean principles into healthcare practices offers a pathway to bolster teamwork, optimize processes and ultimately advance the quality of patient care. By embracing these principles, participants will gain a thorough understanding of key Lean tenets, which include reducing waste, fostering continuous improvement and the paramount importance of respecting individuals. This session will help participants apply Lean principles, strengthening partnerships between physicians and allied health professionals and leading to a more integrated, patient-centered healthcare system.

Learning objectives:

Discover Lean principles and how they can be adapted to healthcare settings
Employ strategies for optimizing workflows, leading to more efficient resource allocation and time management
Apply Lean practices to improve patient outcomes and teamwork through standardization and collaboration

CON102: Business Intelligence for Staffing and Productivity

Speaker: Nate Moore, CPA, MBA, FACMPE, President, Moore Solutions, Inc.

Is your practice feeling the effects of quiet quitting and the Great Resignation? Are you resigned to less productive staff, especially those working from home? What are savvy managers doing to monitor, trend and increase productivity in their practices? How can better data help practices be more efficient with the office staff who remain? What about managers’ productivity? What tools and techniques are available to help you be more productive? This session will offer a unique approach to collaborative learning. Attendees will see examples of custom dashboards, reports and spreadsheets that practices across the United States are using to measure and improve productivity. Gain insights from top performers to rethink staff management and drive change amidst challenging times.

Learning objectives:

Discuss current staffing challenges within medical practices
Identify practice productivity-based reports that drive change
Explain new ways to monitor, trend and increase practice productivity

2:45 - 3:00 PM

Refreshment Break

3:00 - 4:00 PM

CON201: Staffing Data, So What? Translating Data into Action

Speakers: Amy Lafko, MSPT, MBA, Keynote Speaker, Author, and Chief Executive Officer, Carin Consulting Solutions; Independent Consultant, MGMA

Andrew Hajde, CMPE, Director, Content and Consulting, MGMA

Medical practices continue to struggle with staffing challenges and are inundated with data, from compensation and turnover rates to staffing ratios per physician FTE. But simply having access to this data is not enough – the real challenge lies in transforming it into actionable solutions that drive operational excellence. This session empowers attendees to do just that, leveraging MGMA's extensive benchmarking data to develop practical strategies that address theses staffing needs. By turning staffing data into action, medical practices can improve productivity, enhance patient access, and position themselves for sustainable success.

Learning objectives:

Examine MGMA’s benchmarking data to identify areas of strength and needs for improvement within your organization
Develop data-driven strategies for every aspect of the employee lifecycle (selection through retention)
Prioritize and implement action steps that have lasting impact on staffing within your practice

CON202: How to Optimize Performance in the Remote Workplace Hosted by Massachusetts and Rhode Island MGMA

Speaker: Shannon Cameron, MBA, MHIIM, CPC, Executive Director, Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians

The overlapping challenges in healthcare, such as shrinking profit margins, inflation, and staffing shortages, are severely affecting bottom-line performance, especially during a period of financial vulnerability. Many healthcare leaders are tasked with how to monitor remote staff members' day-to-day activities and ensure they're working efficiently and producing results that drive revenue recovery. Therefore, effective management of healthcare revenue cycle staff is increasingly crucial. This often entails overseeing and motivating remote employees spread across various locations—a strategy that presents unique opportunities and challenges in meeting performance metrics.

This presentation will explore strategies that employ multiple methods to achieve significant ROI in both financial performance and employee satisfaction, as well as provide guidance on how to keep ALL staff engaged and moving towards optimal performance.

Learning objectives:

Discuss staffing strategies to achieve significant ROI
Identify how to keep ALL staff engaged and moving toward optimal performance
Describe how to monitor remote staff members' day-to-day activities to ensure efficiency and productivity

4:00 - 4:15 PM

Passing Break

4:15 - 4:45 PM

CON301: The Changing Locum Tenens Landscape: How to Hire, How to Bill to Maximize Profitability

Eligible for: ACMPE: .5 | CEU .5
Strategic Decisions
Traditional | Intermediate | Analysis

Speakers: Matt Littlejohn, CVO Manager, Provider Enrollment, Locumtenens.com

Alan Ashby, Vice President, Primary Care - Physician, Advanced Practitioner and Telehealth Workforce Consultant, Locumtenens.com

In the past, locum tenens clinicians were considered a strategy of last resort – temporary replacements to cover shifts for a provider on leave when no one else could cover. Today's locum tenens clinician workforce is a critical staffing strategy for leading healthcare organizations, an essential component that ensures patient access to care. However, enrollment and billing haven’t kept up with the evolution, and many facilities are leaving money on the table to avoid billing errors, denials, and fraudulent claims, particularly for contingent staff. This myth-busting presentation will show how modern healthcare organizations are intentional and strategic about their non-permanent workforce. It will introduce new best practices for enrollment for locum tenens physicians and advanced practice providers, including emerging strategies to streamline the process and maximize profitability.

Learning objectives:

Identify the qualities today’s locum tenens physicians and APPs bring to the table in their desire for a more flexible work-life model
Discuss how to enroll locum tenens physicians and APPs when you are integrating them into your staffing strategy
Describe actionable to-do list for maximizing profitability and minimizing errors, denials and fraudulent claims

CON302: Revolutionizing Healthcare Administration: Unlocking Efficiency and Enhancing Patient Care Experience with AI

Eligible for: ACMPE: .5 | CEU .5
Intermediate | Traditional | Application
Operational Excellence

Speakers: Naomi Rajput, Co-founder, Eden

Evan Smith, Co-founder, Eden

Redundant administrative workflows plague medical practices in seven critical pain points, including scheduling, patient registration, intake, insurance verification, referrals, correspondence, medical records and billing. Discover how digital healthcare solutions can target these pain points with AI automation. Join Naomi Rajput and Evan Smith, co-founders of Eden, as they share how healthcare leaders can enhance operational efficiency, improve patient care experiences, and empower patients to navigate their healthcare without excessive reliance on administrative staff.

Learning objectives:

Identify how AI automation can streamline administrative workflows
Report the impact of reducing redundant tasks on staffing costs and employee satisfaction
Review strategies to enhance patient care and practice efficiency

4:45 - 6:00 PM

Dedicated Exhibitor Time and Reception

Friday, August 16

7:30 AM - 1:00 PM

Registration Open

7:30 - 8:00 AM

Breakfast

8:00 – 9:00 AM

CON401: Optimizing Your Recruitment and Onboarding Process

Speaker: Adrienne Lloyd MHA, FACHE, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Optimize Healthcare; Independent Consultant, MGMA

Recruiting top talent is vital as your organization grows and seeks to meet new strategic priorities. However, recruitment and onboarding can be time-consuming, burdensome, and dreaded. This session will explore how to design your processes to automate recruitment and onboarding while maintaining a high level of personalization for candidates to ensure that the process is fun and reflective of your organizational culture.

Learning objectives:

Describe ways to streamline the recruitment and onboarding processes, automating where possible
Explain how to screen and interview candidates to hire and retain them
Discover ways to engage new hires throughout the onboarding process so they become high-performing team members

CON402: Compensation and Benefits Strategies for Staff

Speaker: Sharon E. Sagarra, MBA, FACMPE, Owner, Sagarra Medical Consulting, LLC; Independent Consultant, MGMA

With minimum wage rates increasing while insurance reimbursements decrease, every dollar counts in the medical practice, regardless of size or ownership. A medical practice's most important asset (and one of the biggest expenses) is its staff. By strategically controlling costs and maximizing benefit utilization, medical practices must look for more opportunities to invest (or reinvest) in their staff, thus boosting practice success and employee satisfaction and well-being. This interactive session will look at attracting and retaining employees through meaningful compensation and benefits packages. Attendees are encouraged to share their experiences of what has or has not worked in their practices.

Learning objectives:

Outline effective compensation rates using multiple sources of data
Examine benefit package strategies to satisfy a multigenerational workforce
Produce an "Employee Value Statement" at year-end

9:00 - 9:45 AM

Refreshment Break with Exhibitors

9:45 – 10:45 AM

CON501: Top 10 Ways Practices are Outsourcing and Automating

Speaker: Katie Nunn, MBA, CMPE, Chief Executive Officer, Bright Ideas Medical Consulting

Inflation and rising wages are causing practices to look for ways to do more with less. This session will look at the top 10 things that practices are doing to become more efficient and less dependent on internal staff via outsourcing and/or automating. From Population Health to Virtual Management, we will talk about the pros and cons of the hottest outsourcing trends.

Learning objectives:

Identify ways that practices are outsourcing /automating to reduce staffing needs
Describe the pros and cons of outsourcing and automating
Discover the processes all practices should have automated

CON502: Developing an Employee Wellness Program in Your Practice

Speaker: Bill Kenney, MHA, CMPE FACHE, Chief Executive Officer, Dermatology Consultants, PA

Dermatology Consultants identified the need for an employee wellness program, gained leadership and physician support, engaged management and staff to define the program and successfully implemented it, resulting in high levels of employee engagement. The presenter will discuss the branding, infrastructure, program elements and specific activities which could be adapted to practices of various sizes. The presenter will provide several visual tools which could be adapted to other practices.

Learning objectives:

Discover the elements required to develop the infrastructure for an employee wellness program, including brand image, organizational communications, committee structure and outcomes
Produce engagement with physician and administrative leadership for employee wellness improvements
Manage successful interventions and activities that can be adapted to other practices

10:45 - 11:00 AM

Passing Break

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

CON601: Creating Your Provider Recruitment Playbook

Speaker: Liz Mahan, MFA, CPRP-DEI, Director of Professional Development and Solutions, Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment

There hasn’t been a "recruitment playbook" for practices to use in recruiting and retaining top provider talent. Why? The necessary strategies to attract physicians and advanced practice providers must be unique to the needs of the practice, patients and communities they serve. It starts by identifying candidates who will uphold the mission and values and be a strong cultural fit to the practice and community. This session will explore strategies to adapt and leverage to realize success— “must haves” you need in place prior to initiating a recruitment search. You will be given examples and situations to help you sidestep potential mishaps. This presentation will provide stakeholders with key elements and best practices that will help guide your engagement and input into the process. We’ll discuss the importance of identifying the purpose of the position and attributes of your ideal candidate so that appropriate strategies are developed to attract physicians to your organization while avoiding a mismatch of talent to the position. Attendees will be able to critically evaluate their roles and programs to maximize recruitment success.

Learning objectives:

Discover the key skills (hard and soft) and attributes a physician or advanced practice provider must have to be an ideal fit for the practice, organization and community.
Employ a strategic recruitment process that fosters the retention of top clinical talent.
Manage your role and your program to maximize recruitment success.

CON602: Employee Turnover: Why Your Team is Leaving and What to Do About It

Speakers: Tracey Schwartz, M.Ed., FACMPE, Vice President, Operations, Ascension Medical Group

Robyn Hoffman, MBA, MSPT, Director of Physician Operations, Ascension Medical Group

Employee turnover is an increasing challenge for many organizations. The healthcare workforce has changed significantly since the pandemic, leading to increased costs, reduced productivity and loss of valuable talent. With associates leaving healthcare for early retirement, exiting the industry completely or opting for remote work over on-site employment, retaining tenured and recently hired associates is increasingly challenging, and profitability has suffered as a result of increasing labor and supply costs and declining reimbursement. This financial burden has pressured healthcare systems to increase productivity with fewer resources, further challenging current staffing levels. Employee turnover has associated high costs and leads to declining quality patient care and satisfaction along with reduced employee morale. This presentation will identify key drivers of voluntary turnover and enable attendees to measure and analyze targeted areas for effective improvement strategies to impact job satisfaction and retention. Attendees will learn how our organization standardized our understanding for resignations and implementation strategies for retaining associates. Strategies include leadership training on relationship building, effective onboarding, career development opportunities, enhanced communication through newsletters and town halls, work-life balance initiatives, and other employment engagement and retention tactics. The session also will review compensation design for challenging roles to fill and retain.

Learning objectives:

Outline key drivers of voluntary turnover and they relate to targeted areas for improvement
Prepare effective strategies to impact turnover through increased employee job satisfaction
Analyze the impact of selected interventions, modifying as needed for optimal results

12:00 - 1:00 PM

Lunch and networking

1:00 – 2:00 PM

CON701: Prioritizing Solutions and Building an Action Plan for Staffing Challenges

Facilitator: Katie Nunn, MBA, CMPE, Chief Executive Officer, Bright Ideas Medical Consulting

Before we return home, let's harness the collective knowledge of the attendees to help identify and prioritize the best solutions from the Staffing conference. Participants will again join roundtables organized by state and topical interest to share insights in this moderated and structured networking session.

Learning objectives:

Prioritize solutions to key staffing challenges facing healthcare organizations
Build an Action Plan to impactful solutions

2:00 – 2:15 PM

Passing break

2:15 – 3:15 PM

MS2: From Awareness to Action: Building Stronger Teams Together

Speaker: Katie Lawrence, MHA, CMPE, Principal Consultant, Willow Strategy Group; Independent Consultant, MGMA

Enlighted leaders know that building a culture that is diverse, equitable and inclusive is not just the right thing to do. The impact of embracing DEI hits every aspect of the Quintuple Aim: improving the quality of care, enhancing patient experience, reducing costs, addressing clinician and employee experience, and advancing health equity.

To continue to transform the healthcare industry, medical practice leaders must become capable of embracing diversity and working toward equity and inclusion. Despite good intentions, leaders are uncomfortable addressing these issues because they don’t want to say or do the wrong thing.

Through this session, leaders will understand why DEI is crucial for their workplace and what often stands in the way of successful DEI initiatives. They will walk away with skills and knowledge to implement change that begins with diversity and expands to embrace equity and inclusion.

Learning objectives:

Recognize the importance of shared language around DEI initiatives and the positive impact of DEI on a broad range of organizational metrics
Identify the hurdles that often slow the progress of DEI work in organizations
Review tools and actions for DEI work within their own organizations

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MGMA Focus | Staffing Conference

Uncover staffing and retention solutions and best practices in healthcare management

Thursday, August 15

Friday, August 16