Woburn, MA (PRWEB) January 27, 2015

HealthcareSource(R), the leading provider of talent management solutions for the healthcare industry, announced today that continuing care norms are now available within the HealthcareSource Staff AssessmentSM behavioral assessment solution. Continuing care encompasses non-acute care organizations such as long-term care communities, home health agencies, and hospice providers, and excludes acute care organizations such as hospitals and urgent care centers.

Although hiring and employee retention is a challenge across the healthcare industry, it's even more challenging in continuing care. The increased physical and emotional demands of working with patients and their families in continuing care settings require a different mix of behavioral competencies than working in acute care settings. As a result of these challenges, recruitment measures, such as time to fill, and retention measures, such as employee turnover, are higher in continuing care organizations than acute care.

"Retention is a significant issue in continuing care organizations because it impacts both the cost and quality of patient and resident care," says Dr. Frederick Morgeson, Eli Broad Professor of Management at The Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University and Scientific Advisor to HealthcareSource. "Having applicant norms specific to continuing care organizations is valuable because it can improve recruitment processes to ensure that organizations are hiring the best employees to deliver a great patient and resident experience."

"The pace of change in health care is accelerating and employers are realizing the need to develop staff with the competencies required to effectively contribute to positive impacts on population health in their particular community," says Dawn Rose, Executive Director of the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration (ASHHRA) of the American Hospital Association (AHA). "It is increasingly important that health care human resources professionals have the resources and structures to proactively identify opportunities for development, thoughtfully cultivate the skills and expertise of their employees, and intentionally create plans to ensure organizational success through ongoing efforts to attract and maintain a highly competent workforce that delivers the best possible care for patients and residents."

Staff Assessment is a behavioral science-based assessment software solution for selecting and developing staff. These assessments measure key healthcare competencies for an individual and compare them to their healthcare peers. Staff Assessment transforms the interview process by applying behavioral science to measure and develop key competencies like compassion, teamwork, and flexibility. By objectively uncovering strengths and weaknesses, organizations are able to improve service excellence and hire staff that aligns with the organization's culture.

"Having continuing care norms data available in Staff Assessment adds tremendous value to the recruitment process for our clients in long-term care facilities and other non-acute healthcare organizations," says Michael DiPietro, chief marketing officer at HealthcareSource. "With the ability to benchmark performance against peer organizations and identify areas for improvement in the recruitment process, continuing care organizations can reduce their time to fill and cost per hire while improving retention rates - all of which result in improved quality of care for patients, residents, and their families."

"Recruitment norms data is crucial for understanding how our organization can compete for the best talent in a very challenging hiring environment," says HealthcareSource client Myra Johnson, vice president of human resources as Heritage Community of Kalamazoo. "Not all healthcare organizations are alike, and continuing care organizations are particularly unique, so it's extremely valuable to have data specific to our segment of the industry."

About HealthcareSource With more than 2,500 healthcare clients, HealthcareSource is the leading provider of talent management solutions for the healthcare industry. The HealthcareSource Quality Talent Suite? helps healthcare organizations recruit, develop, and retain the best workforce possible in order to improve the patient and resident experience. The company's cloud-based talent management solutions include applicant tracking, behavioral assessments, reference checking, employee performance, compensation, competency and learning management, and eLearning courseware. A private company focused exclusively on the healthcare industry, HealthcareSource consistently earns high marks for client satisfaction and retention. KLAS Research recently named HealthcareSource a category leader for Talent Management for the third consecutive year, in addition to recognition in Healthcare Informatics 100, Modern Healthcare's "Healthcare's Hottest," Inc. 500|5000, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and Becker's "150 Great Places to Work in Healthcare" list. To learn more about HealthcareSource visit: http://www.healthcaresource.com.

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Behavioral Norms for Continuing Care Industry Now Available in HealthcareSource Staff Assessment

On a table in Masons University of Chicago lab sits a plexiglass box about two feet square. Inside is a white Sprague-Dawley rat, a strain bred for laboratory study, and a plexiglass canister holding a black-and-white Long-Evans rat.

The trapped Long-Evans is clearly agitated. The white rat is too. Instinctively, she wants to stay in the corner; rats avoid open spaces, and navigate by touch, which is why you often see them scurrying along walls. Yet she rushes again and again to the canister, sniffing at the rat inside, nosing the glass, nudging the door. Eventually, she opens it, freeing the rat. They rub together.

At a purely descriptive level, you could say one rat helped another. Why that happened is the question. According to Peggy Mason and collaborator Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, the free rat appears to empathize with her trapped comrade. She recognized the rats distress, grew distressed herself and wanted to help. This appears to be a powerful impulse in rats. In tests of whether rats would rather eat than help another rat, the researchers found empathys pull to be as strong as their desire for chocolate and rats do love their chocolate.

The two researchers first claimed rats might feel empathy in a high-profile 2011 Science paper describing rats freeing their cagemates, rats they had been cohabitating with. They expand on those findings in the latest study, which describes rats helping strangers. Its a radical, even controversial, claim. Some scientists recognize that chimpanzees, a few cetaceans and perhaps elephants could be empathic, but few have ascribed that trait to rats. If R. norvegicus can be empathic, that fundamentally human trait might in fact be ubiquitous.

Were in a period of transition with respect to how we think about animals, said environmental philosopher Eileen Crist. After centuries of seeing the animal kingdom as a hierarchy with humans on top, of treating animals as purely instinct-driven biological machines, cognitive ethology is opening up a new terrain. Knowledge itself is fluid and changing right nowand empathy investigations are very much a part of that.

Those whove had pet rats may not be surprised by reports of their empathy, nor will readers of naturalists texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Witmer Stone and William Everett Cram, for example, wrote of rats in 1902s American Animals, Careful witnesses have always given them credit for looking after any helpless member of their family.) But informal observations carry little scientific weight, and researchers are reluctant to describe what animals might think and feel. After all, animals cant tell us, and we cant read their minds.

Theres some historical baggage, too. Twentieth-century study of animal behavior was famously inhospitable to the idea that animals feel much of anything. B.F. Skinner, the father of modern animal behavioral science, called emotions an excellent example of the fictional causes to which we commonly attribute behavior. Such views have largely fallen from favor, but science has been slow to embrace Charles Darwins essential point: that humans and other animals necessarily share not only anatomical roots, but neurological origins.

Claiming empathy for rats isnt easy, and one criticism of Mason and Ben-Amis interpretation is that a far simpler phenomenon called emotional contagion could explain their rats helpfulness. In other words, when one rat becomes distressed, that distress spreads to othersbut they dont necessarily feel for the first and translate that feeling into intention.

As Oxford University zoologist Alex Kacelnik and colleagues noted in a 2012 Biology Letters reflection on empathy research, some ants display helping behaviors similar to Mason and Ben-Ami Bartals rats. Any solid evidence for empathy in non-humans would be a notable advance, they wrote, but, in our view, it remains unproven outside humans.

Other researchers defended the possibility of rat empathy. Ants are not rats, quipped Frans de Waal, an Emory University ethologist who has written extensively about empathy, on Facebook. It would be totally surprising, from a Darwinian perspective, if humans had empathy and other mammals totally lacked it. As for Mason and Ben-Ami Bartal, theyve downplayed the empathy interpretation in their latest work, restricting it to speculative discussion.

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The Intriguing New Science That Could Change Your Mind About Rats