Natalie Foster, President and Co-founder of Economic Security Project: Making the Case for a New Economic Paradigm

“I really think that everything from this last election to Brexit to the unrest around the country and the world shows that the old economic paradigm of trickle-down economics has left families broke and in debt and in need of a new paradigm,” says Natalie Foster, president of the Economic Security Project. The answer, as she lays out in her new book The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy, is to provide individuals and families with the same sense of security that American businesses enjoy through a web of laws and institutions that provide the stability they need to be innovative and thrive.
As Foster tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, she sees the new paradigm — which would create an economic floor of guaranteed income, housing, healthcare, childcare and education — as an evolution of American capitalism. “It’s an evolution that’s needed if we are truly to tap into the genius that exists all over this country but is unevenly tapped now because opportunity in America is uneven.” Foster says pilot programs in various cities and states have proven the wisdom of the approach, and she’s expects those local innovations to continue during what will likely be a period of national inaction given the outcome of the November elections. Don’t miss this provocative conversation that includes discussion of extending income guarantees to those pursuing jobs in specific sectors with severe workforce shortages, and what federal policy during the pandemic taught us about the power of economic security.

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Shalin Jyotishi, Founder and Managing Director of New America’s Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative: New Opportunities in the Innovation Economy

One of one of the most significant attempts to spur economic growth and U.S. global competitiveness since the space race was made a few years ago through the CHIPS and Science Act, but many people in workforce development, economic development and higher education aren’t aware of the new opportunities flowing from it. Our guest on this episode of WorkforceRx, Shalin Jyotishi, launched the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at New America to help create that awareness and help localities prepare to take advantage of those opportunities. “We’re focused on building the capacity of higher education and workforce institutions to be better positioned to respond to economic development and industrial policy investments coming into their communities, especially around the innovation economy and emerging technologies,” he tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. One key example is that the CHIPS Act expanded the mission of the National Science Foundation to include supporting the translation of research into technologies, companies and, ultimately, jobs with an eye on regional equity. “The objective here is to make sure that the entire country is able to come along for the ride and not just the traditional tech hotspots like Silicon Valley and Boston,” Jyotishi explains. Tune in to find out which states are early winners in this expansion of opportunity and what else has been set in motion in the attempt to align federal investment with tech innovation to renew the American middle class.

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Joe E. Ross, President of Reach University: Turning Jobs Into Degrees

For those who can’t afford to leave their job to earn a degree, there’s a relatively new ‘learn and earn’ model that essentially turns a job into a degree program. It’s called the apprenticeship degree, and we’re going to learn all about it on today’s episode of WorkforceRx from Joe Ross, president of Reach University, which is dedicated to growing this approach. As Ross tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, Reach’s first area of focus is K-12 schools where it can offer classroom aides, cafeteria workers and other staff without bachelor’s degrees a pathway to the teaching profession. A typical student might do online seminars twice per week in addition to working fulltime. Not only will this help with the teacher shortage, Ross says, it also increases diversity. “Paraeducators are much more likely to look like the students they serve in a given community than the teachers.” Find out how the programs are funded, how liberal arts courses can be integrated into the workplace experience and what models Reach is developing for the behavioral health sector as this innovation becomes more popular.

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Dr. Alan Glaseroff, Co-Director of Stanford University’s High Value Healthcare Incubator: Solutions For the Shortage of Primary Care Physicians

“The job is broken. Primary care is about relationships and building trust with patients, and knowing who they are as people. You can’t do that in a fifteen minute visit,” says Dr. Alan Glaseroff, a longtime family physician and health care delivery innovator affiliated with Stanford University. Add to that the need to do hours of administrative work on weeknights and weekends, and Glaseroff can understand why it’s hard to get medical students to choose primary care as a specialty. As he tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, the answer starts with changing the model of care to restore the appeal of primary care as a career. On this episode of WorkforceRx, Glaseroff shares several innovations he helped develop at Stanford that revolved around empowering medical assistants to do more. “Our medical assistants had their own panels of patients. They stayed in touch with the patients between visits and they helped motivate them in activities that would make them more healthy.” Other structural changes allowed physicians to only intervene with patients when most needed, and ensured that everyone’s work was done by 5pm. The result was improved patient satisfaction, job satisfaction and quality of care. Tune in to learn about other innovations in the delivery system and payment system that might help address the chronic shortage of primary care physicians that is hampering efforts to improve health and healthcare.

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Dr. Stacey Ocander, Nebraska Hospital Association: Helping Young People Choose Healthcare Careers

Studies show that when it comes to getting people interested in any career, early exposure can make a significant impact on their ultimate choice. That helps explain why a program in Nebraska that’s aimed at cultivating interest in healthcare jobs begins in the third grade. As we learn in this episode of WorkforceRx, the Health Careers Pipeline Initiative is just one of several workforce development strategies being pursued by the Nebraska Hospital Association under the guidance of Dr. Stacey Ocander, the association’s senior director of workforce and education initiatives. “You really have to start the excitement young. You have to be the people who establish the strongest relationship before something that may be negative in their life gets a hold of them,” says Ocander, a self-described creative disruptor. The program starts with exposing youngsters to thirty-two healthcare occupations and gradually winnows that number down to one or two as students discover their interests through summer camps and internships in middle school and high school. Ocander sees this sustained contact as critical. “My goal is by the time they’re a senior, our hospitals are engaged to help them pay for that first two years of college to get them to that first license.” Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan for an encouraging exploration of innovative partnerships between hospitals and educators and the benefits of doing ‘business as unusual.’

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Elizabeth Landsberg, California Department of Healthcare Access and Information and Jessica Pitt, California Labor and Workforce Development Agency: Collaboration to Grow the Behavioral Health Workforce 

Today we’re going to take a look at how America’s largest state is tackling one of the biggest
challenges in the nation’s healthcare system: increasing the supply of behavioral health
providers. As we’ll hear from our guests on this episode of WorkforceRx, heightened
attention to the issue from California Governor Newsom‘s administration has led to more funding and a greater degree of coordination at the state level. “Our agencies and departments are coming together in ways they have never come together before to really collaborate and figure out how we can align and leverage resources, expertise, and opportunities,” says Jessica Pitt, assistant deputy secretary of Healthcare Workforce at the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency. Elizabeth Landsberg, director of the California Department of Healthcare Access and Information, calls out new data gathering and modeling initiatives that support the department’s goals of increasing the diversity of the health workforce and the number of providers in medically underserved areas. “The data allows us to see the race, ethnicity, and the languages spoken by the workforce. We’re
using that data to prioritize our efforts geographically and by role to address the largest
shortage areas,” she explains. Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan for an inside look
at California’s strategies for developing and diversifying its behavioral health workforce that include apprenticeships, increasing clinical placements for trainees, and integrating
behavioral health into primary care practices.

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States Are Laboratories of Workforce Development Innovation: Jennifer Davis, Senior Policy Advisor on Human Services, Wyoming Governor’s Office

There are many stakeholders in the ongoing effort to combat healthcare workforce shortages but one of the most important is state governments because of their critical role in providing healthcare services. Today on WorkforceRx, we’re going to check in with one of the states that is leading national efforts to find solutions by talking with Jennifer Davis, Senior Policy Advisor on Human Services to Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon. Jen has been instrumental in Wyoming’s robust efforts to increase the healthcare workforce, particularly with regard to the providers of mental and behavioral health services. “We did some mapping of the behavioral health professions that we actually have in Wyoming and in some of those, we only have one or two people who are licensed and so it’s really forced us to have a conversation about what do we want to be, what is working toward that end, and what is not?” Strategies to deal with shortages in mental health and other healthcare fields include clearing barriers in licensing, improving credit transfers from the state’s community colleges to its sole university, and creating clear educational pathways in consultation with industry sectors. There is much to learn in this probing conversation with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan about recruitment and retention strategies for rural areas, efforts to maintain access by upskilling providers, and national initiatives to develop and share best practices.

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John Colborn, Executive Director of Apprenticeships for America: Raising the Visibility of Apprenticeships

“Anyone who feels like they want to go to college should be able to go, but having just one choice for every young person entering the labor market seems like a mistake,” says John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America. Opening a second pathway of apprenticeship would not only serve those for whom college is not a viable option, Colborn argues, but it would also help employers who need workers with hard skills that are often not acquired through degree programs. Colborn is particularly excited about an emerging third path that blends apprenticeships and degree programs that’s being used to grow the ranks of nurses, engineers and teachers. “What schools are doing is putting paraprofessionals already working in the school into a teaching role and at the same time enabling them to get the four-year credential that’s necessary to become a full -fledged teacher.” While Colborn hopes this “flex” of the apprenticeship model will boost the country’s low utilization of apprenticeships compared to other industrialized nations, significant growth won’t occur until there is much more federal funding, and different models of funding, than currently exist. Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan on this episode of WorkforceRx for an exploration of what those models can be, and the role that states and other actors can play to boost the visibility of a proven option for supplying the workforce the US economy needs.

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Stephen Handel, ECMC Foundation: Redesigning Higher Ed for A Changing Student Body

Boosting completion rates at higher education institutions in the US has been a hot topic for years, with particular concern given to the relatively low 43% rate for community colleges. We’re going to take a look at solutions to that problem today with Dr. Steve Handel, director of strategy for Post -Secondary Education Transformation at ECMC Foundation. “Part of the work we would like to do is figure out ways to improve that completion rate, particularly for students who we might not predict initially would have the wherewithal to complete a degree. How do we change the structures that were built for a different set of constituencies in a different age,” Handel tells Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. Key steps include addressing obstacles for working adults and adult students with children and improving the transfer process between community colleges and a four-year institutions. A bigger lift might be changing financial incentives so that colleges focus more on completion than the number of students admitted. “Colleges and universities, like all organizations, are going to pivot to the ways that sustain their institutions,” he says. Tune in for an informative scan of other ideas including expanded use of online education, integrating work experiences into degree programs, addressing the high cost of education, and doing a better job of communicating just how essential post-secondary learning is to social and economic mobility.

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Jennifer Lundblad, President and CEO of Stratis Health: Co-Designing Healthcare Quality Improvement

Because Medicare is the largest payer for healthcare services in the U.S., there are continuous efforts throughout the country to control costs and improve quality in the program. We’re going to focus on one of those efforts today, and take a look at what’s involved in improving healthcare quality in general, with Jennifer Lundblad, president and CEO of Stratis Health, a Minnesota nonprofit that works with clinicians, organizations, and communities towards that end. “We, and our peers who do this work across the country, are sort of the boots on the ground quality improvers. We’re trusted because we’re local, we’ve had long -standing relationships, and we’re really valued for the change agent expertise we bring.” Creating peer-to-peer learning and action networks and offering various forms of technical assistance serve the goal of building the capacity of organizations to do ongoing quality improvement work on their own. In terms of what would strengthen the field, Lundblad believes greater use of implementation science could help spread best practices, and co-design could make quality programs more relevant and effective. “Co-design brings to the fore the voices and experiences of those who are traditionally not part of a quality improvement process. It’s an emerging approach that will allow us to design things in the right way from the start.” Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan for an encouraging exploration of the often invisible but critically important work of quality improvement in healthcare.

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