Workforce strategy lessons from a healthcare giant serving 6M+ patients annually

I’m bringing an insightful and practical case study that demonstrates how organizations can modernize workforce planning by integrating internal performance metrics, external talent intelligence, and AI transformation insights. 

We collaborated with a large, complex healthcare provider serving nearly six million patients annually—an environment characterized by high variability and scale, providing a strong blueprint for broader workforce strategy applications across various industries.

Step 1: Internal Workforce Diagnostics (Note – We played a supporting role as their internal team gathered these datasets, but providing this so that you can see the full methodology)

We began by conducting a detailed assessment of internal workforce datasets, covering 221 job families across 33 job categories. These were enriched with key operational and HR metrics, including:

• Applications per hire
• Qualified candidate ratios
• Population aging trends
• Engagement scores and burnout indicators
• Weighted turnover rates
• Headcount distribution and talent availability
• Changes in job opening patterns

This baseline allowed us to understand not just current workforce performance but also emerging vulnerabilities.

Step 2: Strategic Talent Focus (This is a step often missed in Workforce Planning, so we developed frameworks for this)

With the internal diagnostics in hand, we applied a prioritization lens to identify eight high-impact job families that are most aligned with the organization’s care delivery and transformation priorities. These roles were selected based on:

• Business-criticality
• Workforce stability
• Organizational reliance on the role
• Future demand indicators
• Exposure to burnout and attrition

This step narrowed the scope for deeper analysis while ensuring that the workforce plan remained strategically grounded.

Step 3: External Talent Intelligence Layer

We augmented the internal view with external labor market signals, including:

• Regional supply–demand dynamics
• Hiring difficulty indices and wage inflation
• Emerging skill shifts due to automation and AI
• Peer benchmarking and competitive hiring activity

This market-facing lens ensured that role prioritization was not insular, and that the organization’s workforce strategy reflected real-world availability and urgency.

Step 4: Multi-Lens Role Scoring

We developed a composite prioritization model combining internal importance, strategic criticality, and external impact signals.
Each job family was evaluated across three dimensions:

1. Internal Metrics
   Including burnout score, turnover rate, internal supply constraints, and productivity impact
2. Importance
   Derived from alignment with strategic priorities and future-state organizational models
3. Impact
   Capturing the projected influence of AI and automation, and role disruption potential

These inputs were scored, normalized, and visually plotted using a three-axis framework to drive alignment and action.

Summary: We employed a multi-step workforce planning approach that combines internal diagnostics, strategic role filtering, external talent intelligence, and AI disruption insights. Through a Strategic Talent Focus phase, eight critical job families were shortlisted. These were then scored across internal metrics, strategic importance, and external impact. The approach is unique in that it explicitly incorporates AI transformation to guide Build–Buy–Borrow–Bot decisions