Kahuna Workforce Solutions and Intermountain Healthcare Create Partnership Focused on Revolutionizing Competency Management in Healthcare

Kahuna Workforce Solutions (Houston, TX) and Intermountain Healthcare (Salt Lake City, UT) are announcing the completion of a commercialization agreement wherein Kahuna has exclusively licensed Intermountain Healthcare’s unique competency management content for healthcare organizations. Under terms of the agreement, Kahuna will market and distribute Intermountain’s competency management content within its proven SaaS platform and offer the combined solution to the healthcare market. The digital competency assurance platform will enable integrated healthcare systems to track and manage their workforce capabilities to meet enterprise staffing needs.

Kahuna Workforce Solutions and Intermountain Healthcare Create Partnership Focused on Revolutionizing Competency Management in Healthcare

Healthcare organizations are undergoing a massive move toward digitization as they strive to operate more efficiently and more consistently relative to the accepted standard of care. Processes from orientation to continuous learning to staffing are all being examined. The conclusion for many is that the current manual, paper-laden processes are not scalable or sustainable and typically result in costly redundancies, siloed data, and general frustration.

Having digitized their own clinical competency management processes, Intermountain Healthcare has realized operational efficiencies and has validated their clinical competency content with over 3.6 million competency assessments. These efforts have resulted in a significant ROI with over $13 million in savings in the first six years, and an amazing record of zero Joint Commission audit findings with their digitized competency content.

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“Digitizing our orientation processes has been a game-changer. We started 11 years ago and invested significant time and resources into standardizing our role-based curricula and observational assessments into required behavioral expectations. Defining the exact skills each role needed and providing the content in a digital platform has made the entire organization more efficient,” said Tammy Richards, Intermountain’s Assistant Vice President of Professional Practice and Learning. “This solution helps our staff work at the top of their license and gets them doing the work they’re qualified to do as quickly as possible. Working with Kahuna, we now have the opportunity to take what we’ve done to a whole new level and bring this solution to our peers across the healthcare industry.”

The Kahuna/Intermountain solution vastly improves these processes through the combination of leading-edge technology and best-in-class competency content. The combined Kahuna/Intermountain solution achieves the following:

• Efficiency – Elimination of redundancies in skill assessment and training hours through automated assignment and a “building block” approach to career development.

• Transparency – “Single pane of glass,” where learning, competencies, procedures, and experience all come together to form a complete picture of each individual as well as aggregation to a unit or an entire facility or system.

• Alignment to the Future – Historically, tracking caregiver competencies has largely been about risk avoidance (i.e. audit requirements). With this digital platform, competency assurance is optimized while also enabling strategic planning for future workforce needs, employee development, tactical staffing, and flexible enterprise staffing models. With the Kahuna/Intermountain solution, organizations will put in place a foundation for capturing and structuring this data that comes ready to support these downstream processes on Day 1.

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Kahuna brings a best-of-breed competency management platform that has been built to serve the needs of complex global competency assurance environments. Kahuna’s CEO, Jai Shah, said of the partnership, “We have worked very hard to build a skills platform that works for regulated environments and always knew we could deliver significant value in healthcare. To enter the market with a gold standard organization such as Intermountain Healthcare as both a customer and a partner is just an amazing opportunity.”

Intermountain provides validated competency and skills content that has been curated to suit a number of various roles (nursing and non-nursing). This content library can fill the gap for systems needing assessment criteria designed by healthcare professionals and organized in a user-friendly format. “Oftentimes, the inertia in competency or skills initiatives is the lack of alignment on the actual content. Beyond being associated with a great brand like Intermountain, the idea that we can offer such high-quality validated content to the healthcare market makes this partnership very exciting,” added Shah.

“Our market analysis confirmed that the competency management processes for clinical personnel are ripe for improvement across our industry. By partnering with Kahuna, we are bringing something revolutionary to healthcare institutions by addressing very real and material inefficiencies,” said Mike Phillips, M.D., Managing Director and Partner for Intermountain Ventures. “While this partnership with Kahuna marks an important milestone for our internal innovation program and for Ventures, more importantly, this solution creates significant internal value while also laying a foundation for how other institutions can plan, develop, and deploy their clinical resources in the future.”

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