Mosaic Life Care takes a holistic approach to employee education

Mosaic Life Care is a physician-led healthcare system based out of St. Joseph, Missouri. With a focus on holistic patient care, they serve over 35 counties throughout Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa. Their goal is always to put patients first, treating them as the multifaceted individuals they are, rather than as a list of conditions on a clipboard. Mosaic wanted to find a partner to help them further streamline their employee education and onboarding initiatives, so they could continue offering top-of-the-line healthcare to all who need it. After almost eight years in partnership, it looks like Cornerstone turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.

With just about 500 certified beds, three stroke specialization centers, three hospitals, and more than 60 area clinical facilities offering urgent, specialty, and primary care, Mosaic has built a legacy around inpatient, outpatient, primary, special and emergency care on which their wider community can rely. Nearly 300,000 patients have passed through the Mosaic system since its inception.

“We want to take a look at the patient holistically,” relates Shelly Higdon, a senior production analyst for the company. “Most healthcare companies focus on just treating the disease. But we look at their financial and spiritual needs too. Our focus is getting them back to the best version of themselves that they can be.”

Maintaining this level of patient care requires a robust crew of well-trained staff and constant recruiting efforts to bring on more of the best and brightest. It takes 4,500 employees to service the four states, rendering them the largest employer in their region.

“Mosaic really cares,” says Higdon. “They’re always putting both the patient and their frontline staff first.”

Those in leadership place as much of a premium on caring for their staff as they do for their patients. This meant finding a way to recruit and onboard new employees, as well as provide a way for current staff to enhance their skill level as efficiently and effectively as possible. To meet the needs of an increasingly technological world, they knew equipping their employees with a user-friendly and intuitive all-in-one education platform needed to be a foundational part of their approach going forward.

Shelly Higdon, now a senior production analyst and system administrator for Mosaic Life Care, started as a Registered Nurse on the floor when she joined Mosaic 15 years ago. Since then, she’s spent time in leadership positions for their pediatrics, obstetrics, oncology and medical telemetry divisions.

In 2015, she took on a new position outside her comfort zone: revamping the company’s training and education systems. When she first adopted the new role, Mosaic was just starting to begin its steady growth into the robust, holistic care network it is today.

“We went from one healthcare facility to three with 50+ clinics,” she says. “We needed a way to get our training out to more and more people.”

Mosaic’s first challenge was combining the current paper and electronic processes into one system. This started Mosaic on the hunt for a platform to sync up these necessary files between all the departments that needed them. After careful research, Cornerstone took the lead as their preferred contender.

“Whenever the opportunity to work on the system implementation came up,” Higdon recalls, “I said, ‘I want to try this. There has got to be a better way besides all this manual tracking.’”

Soon after beginning a partnership in 2015, Cornerstone helped Mosaic build a one-stop network for performance management and employee education. Still, this was just the beginning of the journey. Higdon realized the platform had more potential to connect with and educate employees like never before.

Higdon has also used Cornerstone recruiting software to source and entice top talent into Mosaic’s network. Effective and on-target recruiting is essential for any business, but Mosaic had a particular need to bring on people capable of embodying the company’s important mission. By using Cornerstone’s recruitment CRM, she set out to bring on people who realize the importance of a patient-centric experience.

“Our motto is that the needs of patients come first,” says Higdon. “So how do we get that training to caregivers? How do we get the right people hired with that same belief? We utilize Cornerstone to achieve those goals.”

Since utilizing the software, Mosaic has continued to hire new people capable of fulfilling patient needs at every level of care. From hiring new administrative staff to nurses and doctors, Higdon has used Cornerstone’s recruitment resources to further pad Mosaic’s 4,500-strong roster.

“Recruiting is huge for us,” she says, “and Cornerstone gets the right people to the right place.”

Once new hires enter Mosaic’s patient care centers, the company seamlessly transitions them into the onboarding opportunities afforded through Cornerstone’s extensive learning library. Not to mention, the Cornerstone LMS allows for unique training modules distinctive to individual roles, no matter what the specific position.

“It's all electronic, and delivered directly to our preceptors and leaders,,” Higdon relates. “Everything is dynamically assigned from the day they are hired, and they have no question about their path as they onboard.”

For that matter, the LMS and onboarding pathways also allow for each individual employee to move at their own pace, depending on how quickly they grasp new content. In other words, each new staff member gets the sort of treatment from Cornerstone that patients can expect from Mosaic: customizable, individualized and focused on holistic betterment.

“We use a model to really grow and develop a person,” Higdon remarks. “For example, if they're excelling in a skill as a nurse, they move through the onboarding pathways quicker. If they need to grow a little bit more, it adjusts with them.”

Mosaic wanted to improve its ability to track data on various metrics, from recruiting to learning and performance. With Cornerstone, they could begin recording valuable data in a far more efficient way than ever before.

“Our goal is to capture benchmark data around Mosaic recruitment with the potential to create a bonus structure for our recruiters based on goals,” Higdon remarks. “To do this, we utilize the information from Cornerstone and our HRIS, merging them in an Enterprise Data Warehouse. We are then able to slice and dice each data point as we track, trend and set metrics.”

Mosaic’s partnership with Cornerstone married their health network’s personalized, human-centric approach with some of the world’s most up-to-date company tracking and training resources.

“Cornerstone helps our organization be extraordinary because we can get cutting-edge lessons from vendors anywhere across the globe to them within a few minutes,” Higdon says. “Take the pandemic. We had training for the frontline caregivers in a matter of minutes.”

For a business working to bring stellar healthcare to hundreds of thousands of people, keeping employees up to date is not just a nice-to-have perk; it’s essential. Cornerstone remains committed to helping Mosaic provide thousands of hardworking caregivers with the training they need to perform their job to the best of their ability.

“Cornerstone's superpower is operating at the cutting edge,” says Higdon. “I love how they constantly challenge us by staying at the forefront of anything new and coming. They help us better ourselves as an organization.”

A holistic approach to betterment, a knack for diagnosing and solving problems, a familiar human touch, and the best technology has to offer—for both Mosaic and Cornerstone, these factors have all added up to a proper prescription for success.