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

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

The Intriguing New Science That Could Change Your Mind About Rats

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

Press conference following the extraordinary meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission – 26 JAN 2015 – Video


Press conference following the extraordinary meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission - 26 JAN 2015
Press conference by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg following an extraordinary ambassadorial meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission. Held today at NATO HQ. More on our website: ...

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Press conference following the extraordinary meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission - 26 JAN 2015 - Video

Greek F 16 crashes in Spain during NATO exercise, killing 10 : 24/7 News Online – Video


Greek F 16 crashes in Spain during NATO exercise, killing 10 : 24/7 News Online
Greek F-16 crashes in Spain during NATO exercise, killing 10 Ten people died Monday after a Greek air force F-16 jet crashed at a base in Los Llanos in southeastern Spain, authorities said....

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Greek F 16 crashes in Spain during NATO exercise, killing 10 : 24/7 News Online - Video

Ten Killed In NATO Fighter Jet Crash In Spain News Today January 27, 2015 – Video


Ten Killed In NATO Fighter Jet Crash In Spain News Today January 27, 2015
Ten Killed In NATO Fighter Jet Crash In Spain News Today January 27, 2015 English News Today January 27, 2015 Top Stories News Updates 27/1/2015 World and International News Today 27th ...

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Ten Killed In NATO Fighter Jet Crash In Spain News Today January 27, 2015 - Video

Edward Snowden Wins 'Debate' With NSA Lawyer

At a public event last week, Edward Snowden argued that the NSA has developed a culture of impunity, that its people are not villains, but they think they can do anything because it is for a just cause. John DeLong, an NSA Director, responded that the idea that NSA activities were unauthorized is wrong, its wrong in a magnificent way.

The two came as close as possible to a live debate at the Privacy in a Networked World symposium at Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science where Snowden had a wide-ranging discussion via a video link with security expert Bruce Schneier. John DeLong (Harvard Law, former Director of Compliance at the NSA, current Director of the NSAs Commercial Solutions Center), immediately followed with his talk about privacy, insisting he did not want to turn it into a point-by-point, Oxford-style debate.

Indeed, the specific details about this surveillance program or that particular law are far less important than the answer to a single question: In defending your country, do you do the right thing or do you do things right?Do you do whats morally right or do you just follow the rules (or make sure it looks like you follow the rules)?

I think Snowden won the debate hands-down because I much prefer his view of the good people of the NSA. Snowden sees them as thinking humans, aware of the values of the country they are trying to defend, and capable of making difficult decisions and weighing all the ramifications of their actions. They went wrong because they got carried away by their mission. DeLong, in contrast, views NSA employees (himself included) as no different from the machines they work with, capable only of following unquestionably rules that are handed down to them by others, rules that can be (and should be) codified into machine language. They havent done anything wrong, because they have never broken the law.

As you can see in thisvideo, most of the Snowden-Schneier discussion revolved around the familiar themes weve seen since the 2013 revelations: The solution to governments intruding into our lives is technology or the encryption of all communications; mass surveillance has exploded because its cheap and easy but it has never stopped a terrorist attack; the technical advantage the NSA used to have over the bad guys has been all but eliminated; the NSA has shifted its focus and a much larger proportion its effort is in offence, not defense.

But about 35 minutes into the conversation, Schneier brought up what I think is the crux of the matter by pointing out the distinction between Are we following the rules? and Are these the right rules? He suggested that the way you get this greater oversight is these discussions of what makes sense, what is moral in our society, what is proper.

Unfortunately, Snowdenin this casedidnt take the bait and responded by pointing out the financial cost of the NSAs actions in terms of the damage to the business of American high-tech corporations. Showing the photo of the NSA tapping into a Cisco router, he said: this has a real cost, not just legally, not just morally, not just ethically, but financially.

In his Wired interview with James Bamford, however, Snowden was quite eloquent about the moral and ethical costs (referencing Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil) and how a culture of impunity has developed at the NSA and other parts of our government:

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Edward Snowden Wins 'Debate' With NSA Lawyer

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Happy Data Privacy Day From The NSA! Twitter Users Respond To Agency's Wishes

The U.S. agency that acknowledged spying on Americans emails and phone calls wished everyone Happy Data Privacy Day!! on Twitter Wednesday. The irony wasn't lost on Twitter users.

Data Privacy Day, which is celebrated on Jan. 28, is an international effort centered on respecting privacy, safeguarding data and enabling trust, according to the National Cyber Security Alliance website, staysafeonline.org. In another ironic twist, that website was down intermittently on Wednesday morning.

The Happy Data Privacy Day tweet from the National Security Agencywas retweeted more than 40 times as of 10 a.m. EST. Some users touched on the irony of the NSA sending those wishes after it acknowledged that it searched Americans emails and phone call records without a warrant in April. The NSAs confirmation of its activities came more than a year after a story in the Guardian noted that the agency could search the phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens, even if they werent suspected of any wrongdoing. The story came from documents given to the newspaper by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who is viewed as either a traitor or a whistleblower, depending on what side youre on.

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Happy Data Privacy Day From The NSA! Twitter Users Respond To Agency's Wishes

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