At a glance
85%
of placement students want to work at the health system after graduating
2,500+
clinicians and students enrolled across five mentoring programs
1 report
holds the accreditation documentation the teams used to rebuild from spreadsheets
- Segment: Large public health system
- Industry: Healthcare
- Location: United States
- Employees: More than 10,000
- Programs: Provider onboarding, nurse residency, nurse leadership, peer nurse mentoring, student placement
The Challenge
The health system's mentoring ran on spreadsheets, and it couldn't grow. That was a costly limit: an internal analysis showed that employees in mentoring left at half the rate of the wider workforce, about 7% turnover against 15%. For a system of more than 10,000 employees competing for nurses, mentoring was reaching too few of the people it most needed to keep.
The manual work was the bottleneck. Administrators matched every pair by hand, followed up on every relationship and kept every record themselves. Each new program meant more of the same work, and the programs needed very different things. New advanced practice providers needed support through onboarding. Nurse residents needed someone to carry them into practice and through their clinical ladder portfolios. Nurse leaders needed development tied to leadership competencies.
Accreditation raised the stakes. Mentoring records feed the health system's Magnet documentation and the nurse residency's ANCC accreditation, and each time those were due, the teams had to rebuild the documentation from spreadsheets.
Student placements were the hardest to run by hand and the most important to get right. Every semester, dozens of students need a preceptor. Each match has to follow the school's eligibility rules, the clinical specialty and the semester calendar, give priority to employees and keep existing preceptor arrangements in place. These students are the health system's future hires, and their placement shapes whether they want to stay.
Why Chronus
The health system chose Chronus over staying on spreadsheets because it could run five programs with very different purposes in one place, without forcing them into one model.
- Each program keeps its own rules. Every program owner sets matching and the participant journey around their program's purpose.
- Coordinators stay in control of placements. Administrator-led matching lets them apply eligibility rules and their own judgment: they set up known pairs by hand, then use bulk matching for everyone else.
- Leadership development gets its own format. Nurse leaders use mentoring circles and competency-based matching.
- New tracks don't start from scratch. Teams build on the setup of earlier tracks.
Before Chronus, we were trying to run a mentoring program from an Excel spreadsheet.
Nursing mentoring program lead
The Solution
Programs run by the people who know them
Ownership sits with clinical and development teams. Nursing administrators run residency and leadership mentoring, advanced practice colleagues run onboarding and student placement, and physician program administrators tailor the experience for their own cohort.
A new track in about five sessions
Working sessions cover profiles, matching criteria, goals, the step-by-step plan each pair follows, and communications. One recent track went from first planning session to launch in about five working sessions of under an hour each.
Relationships built around clinical work
Advanced practice mentoring supports new providers through their first months. Student and preceptor connections run for the length of a clinical rotation, and a student can work with more than one preceptor.
Communications that get physicians to act
Physician program administrators tailored notifications to the actions their cohort needs to take, and keep survey feedback in one place. Physicians now log their mentoring meetings in Chronus; the cohort before them kept those meetings offline.
The Impact
A recruiting pipeline from student placements
- 85% of students would like to work at the health system after they graduate
- 86% reached their learning goals
- 92% student satisfaction
- All 15 meeting-feedback responses rated meetings helpful or better
Accreditation records on demand
An administrator pulled a report of one mentoring connection's activity and had exactly what was needed for an accreditation document, with no spreadsheet reconstruction.
Mentoring at scale
More than 2,500 people have enrolled across five programs and more than 1,500 mentoring connections have formed. About 1,300 people are active today, with about 180 relationships under way at any time.
