The Challenge
- Segment: Large public health system
- Industry: Healthcare
- Location: United States
- Programs: Provider onboarding, nurse residency, nurse leadership, peer nurse mentoring, student placement
A large U.S. public health system wanted mentoring to serve clinicians at very different points in their careers. Newly hired advanced practice providers needed support through onboarding. Nurse residents needed relationships that carried them through the move into practice and into their clinical ladder portfolios. Nurse leaders needed development tied to leadership competencies, and nurses outside the specialized tracks needed a way in too.
The nursing program had been run from spreadsheets. Connecting people was only part of the job. Administrators also had to guide each relationship and keep a record of it, and the residency and nursing teams needed mentoring documentation they could draw on when preparing accreditation materials.
The case for investing was already clear. An internal analysis, done before the health system chose a platform, found that employees in mentoring stayed at markedly higher rates than the workforce as a whole: about 93% against 85%.
Student placements added another layer. Every semester, dozens of students need a preceptor. Coordinators have to respect each school's eligibility rules, the clinical specialty and the semester calendar, give priority to employees, and keep existing preceptor arrangements in place.
Why Chronus
The health system needed each program to keep its own rules inside one shared mentoring environment. Residency, leadership, advanced practice and peer nurse mentoring each have a distinct purpose, and Chronus lets every program owner set matching and the participant journey around that purpose.
With the matching in Chronus, you can connect people very easily, without it being so manual.
Nursing program administrator
Administrator-led matching suits placement coordinators, who need to apply eligibility rules and their own judgment. They set up known pairs by hand, then use bulk matching for everyone else. Leadership development takes a different shape, with mentoring circles and competency-based matching.
New tracks do not start from a blank page. Teams build on the setup of earlier tracks as they decide how their own relationships should work.
The Solution
Programs run by the people who know them
Ownership is spread across clinical and development teams. Nursing administrators shape residency and leadership mentoring, advanced practice colleagues run onboarding and student placement, and physician program administrators tailor the experience for their own cohort.
A new track in a handful of working sessions
Working sessions cover profiles, matching criteria, goals, connection plans and communications. One recent track went from its first planning session to up and running in a handful of short meetings.
Relationships built around the work
Advanced practice onboarding mentoring supports new providers through their first months on the job. Student and preceptor connections run for the length of a clinical rotation, and a student can work with more than one preceptor.
Physician mentoring puts particular weight on communication. Administrators tailored notifications to the actions their cohort needs to take, and keep survey feedback in one place so they can come back to a shared record of the participant experience.
They've been a lot more active on the site since we made those changes.
Physician mentoring program administrator
The Impact
Across the health system's programs, more than 2,500 people have enrolled in mentoring and more than 1,500 mentoring connections have formed. More than 1,200 people are active today, with well over 150 relationships under way at any time.
Student placement surveys show students reaching their goals and wanting to stay:
- 92% student satisfaction
- 86% of students reached their learning goals
- 85% would like to work at the health system after they graduate
- Every meeting-feedback response in one review rated the meetings helpful or better
The records matter in practice too. An administrator pulled a report of one mentoring connection's activity and had exactly what was needed for an accreditation document. And physicians now log meetings in Chronus that the previous cohort kept offline, so the program can see the support that is happening.
