In his 2004 bestseller, “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis wrote “What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.” Lewis’s protagonist, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, disrupted the process of hiring baseball players. Beane realized that scouts let unconscious biases blind them to individuals who generate the very outcome their teams need — runs. Undeterred by scouting convention, Beane pursued players like Chad Bradford, despite his “funny-looking” form. Bradford and the A’s went on to a 20-game winning streak.
Health Care Providers Are Hiring the Wrong People
In healthcare hiring there have long been strong prejudices about race, class and educational attainment. Many of our conventions come from an era when healthcare was delivered primarily by doctors and nurses with elite training whose success depended mostly on content expertise. This paradigm is outdated; we now know that social, behavioral and relational factors are critical drivers of health. Thus, the new healthcare workforce needs more than biomedical knowledge; it needs diverse, empathetic team players at all levels who can support patients holistically. There has been little focus on hiring healthcare professionals with the traits needed to succeed in this new reality. This article offers an approach to finding, hiring, and retaining the diverse array of people needed to deliver the outcomes patients and provider organizations now expect.