The Challenge
- Segment: Large regional health system
- Industry: Healthcare
- Location: United States
- Programs: Medical group employee mentoring, nurse residency, advanced practice provider mentoring, alumni mentoring for internal development courses
A large U.S. regional health system, with a workforce of more than 20,000, wanted mentoring that links professional development with someone who understands a person's goals. That meant different experiences for nurses entering practice, new advanced practice providers settling into their specialties, and employees building toward their next role.
In the health system's medical group, mentoring had been run by hand for years. An earlier program drew early enthusiasm and then lost momentum. Administrators wanted to follow participation past the first introduction and know who still needed a mentor. With the medical group spread across hundreds of locations, connections across sites and teams mattered.
Advanced practice providers (APPs) had a different gap. The nurse practitioner who leads APP mentoring wanted support to continue past initial onboarding, and an earlier program had only loose guardrails. New hires needed room to build confidence and talk through their professional direction as they settled in.
Why Chronus
The teams wanted mentoring that was easier to manage, without forcing one matching process on everyone. Chronus supports administrator-led pairing for nurse residents, and lets medical group employees and APPs choose their own mentors. Profile information and matching recommendations help each team organize those choices around relevant experience and development interests.
For the medical group, the change replaced a manual before-state with one place to run the program.
We used to do our mentoring work by hand. It's great to move to Chronus and use an application that makes the experience more user friendly.
Program development manager
For APP mentoring, prepared conversation guides give mentors a place to start while leaving room for each mentee's needs.
Now that it's much more formal and user friendly, mentors have guides ready for them, instead of having to work out where to steer people.
Nurse practitioner and APP mentoring lead
The Solution
Separate programs on one platform
The health system runs distinct programs for medical group employees, nurse residents, APPs and alumni of its internal development courses. Each program's leaders decide how participants join, how they choose partners and how they use mentoring resources.
Mentoring that picks up after onboarding
New APPs spend the first part of their first year in onboarding, then move into mentoring for the rest of it. The first group included providers who had joined several months earlier, with later hiring groups following. Before launch, the APP lead had stakeholders review close to 30 conversation guides, grouped by topic. The alumni program carries development beyond the classroom, with a mentoring period of more than six months.
Platform nudges plus personal outreach
The medical group pairs platform messages with personal follow-up. While an administrator used matching recommendations and nudged people who were still waiting, the number of enrolled people with a match rose from about 50 to more than 55. A mentoring mixer brought together more than 40 people, including senior leaders and a participant who shared her own experience.
The Impact
Across all of its programs, the health system's dashboard shows mentoring participants staying at a higher rate than the workforce as a whole, and the programs' own reviews show active, useful relationships:
- 94% retention among more than 350 mentoring participants, against 90% across the wider workforce
- More than 30 connections in the alumni program's early weeks, with more than 170 connection plan tasks completed, more than 70 messages and close to 30 meetings
- Every one of more than 20 meeting-feedback responses in the alumni program rated the meeting helpful
- Every APP meeting-feedback response in one review, more than ten in all, was positive
- More than two dozen medical group meeting evaluations rated very helpful or breakthrough, about half of them breakthrough
For administrators and mentors, the value also shows up in everyday use. The medical group's administrator finds running the program easier than the old manual approach, and uses targeted messages to reach employees who still need a connection. As a mentor, the same administrator links action items to development goals. APP mentors start each conversation with prepared guidance rather than a blank page, and each program keeps the matching approach that suits its people.
