HEALTHCARE SOLUTIONS FOR
healthier LIVES

You have a vision to deliver the highest quality of care. Yet, existing norms, regulatory hurdles, financial constraints, change resistance, and burnout get in the way of making changes that stick. We partner to design and deliver customized, innovative solutions that align, inspire, and equip your people to activate meaningful change that sets a new standard for provider well-being and patient care—empowering healthier lives for your workforce and patients.

EMBRACE A holistic APPROACH TO CHANGE

Becoming a healthy, high-performing organization requires a holistic approach to change. We help healthcare organizations achieve sustainable, transformative change that leads to better outcomes by focusing on the following capabilities:

Workforce Well-Being
and Engagement

No one can pour from an empty cup. Ensure your employees feel supported and are equipped with the right resources to maximize engagement; support healthy, high-performing teams; and reduce burnout.

Operational Excellence

There are no workarounds for it. Attract and retain top talent and accelerate evidence-based practice by designing sustainable roles, workflows, and care models that fuel performance and increase efficiency.

Leadership Development

Emails don’t inspire change; engaged leaders do. Activate a strategy to align trusted and connected leaders who embrace a unified vision and build psychological safety for teams to succeed.

Safety and High
Reliability

Checking boxes and temporary fixes aren’t enough. Design processes to continuously assess, improve, and evaluate safety measures that address the human factors that drive high-quality care.

Patient Experience

Key moments define any experience. Leverage human-centered design to optimize the moments that matter for your providers and patients to improve outcomes and satisfaction.

OUR WORK IN action

Every organization has different strategic priorities—and therefore different needs. We custom-craft the solution that is right for you. Here are results from some recent projects:

52% INCREASE
in use of patient-centric
training tool leading
to increased empathy
and understanding

300% ROI GENERATED
from certification training
program, lowering infection rates and improving
patient satisfaction

75% COMPLETION RATE
of voluntary learning experiences, leading to increased associate engagement and
workplace satisfaction

100% ORGANIZATIONAL READINESS
for system go lives
with 90-98% completion of optional online learning

$75M IN REDUCED COSTS
over 18 months at a
1,000-bed medical center

50% REDUCTION
in on-site time for customer
education after virtual
program launch, equating 
to a 14% decrease
in labor costs

PROJECT highlights

Our healthcare and life sciences teams serve 60+ active clients. As a designated vendor, we look forward to strengthening our partnership and continuing to add value across your organization.

Renewing Pharmacists' Passion for Patient Care

The Challenge: A national retail pharmacy sought to reignite the passion that motivates its pharmacists to provide best-in-class patient care at a time when the world was facing a pandemic, employee burnout, and unprecedented turnover in the healthcare industry. To improve the overall engagement for those in the pharmacy and create real change as a leader in the retail healthcare industry, the organization needed to design cohesive human experiences beyond training that enhanced culture, supported growth and development, and reignited passion for leading teams, the organization, and patients.

The Solution: We started from a human-centered design perspective, exploring pharmacy employees’ experiences, reviewing organizational and industry data, and observing the needs of employees and patients. This work unearthed five key pharmacy needs that informed the design of a 12-week experience, which provided pharmacy teams with a springboard to explore their passion for serving patients, leading peers, and fostering a culture that embodies the organization’s vision for health and “food as medicine.” After completing the program, pharmacy employees anecdotally shared that they were “full of energy” and were “thinking about different things with a more open mindset.” Quantitative data also showed an increase in employees’ perceptions of whether they were employed by a “great place to work” and whether they were “seeing positive changes.” The experience was piloted, iterated, and rolled out organization-wide and has since entered a season of sustainment, where new needs are addressed each year.

Optimizing Time for the Nursing Workforce

The Challenge: A Catholic healthcare organization faced recruiting challenges amid a nation-wide shortage of nurses. Meanwhile, its Magnet-recognized nurses were experiencing burnout due to an overwhelming number of tasks associated with their role. The organization sought to innovate its care model by exploring skill mix variations that emphasized a team-based approach but lacked the data needed to inform changes.

The Solution: To inform options for skill mix variations, we conducted a nurse time study analysis of clinical and non-clinical tasks, totaling more than 200 hours of employee observations that occurred across every type of shift. The data helped the organization understand the workload at various employee levels, identify patterns of activity surges by shift and census level, and identify non-essential tasks that consumed too much of the nurses’ time. The analysis enabled the organization to safely transfer non-essential nursing tasks to other employees on the team, ultimately helping provide nurses with more time to invest in essential, patient-focused tasks.

Developing Aligned Senior Leaders

The Challenge: An integrated healthcare system’s senior leadership team comprised several new, legacy, and interim leaders who each embraced different approaches, priorities, and levels of engagement. In addition to wanting the leadership team to embrace a unified vision and shared commitment, the organization sought to increase psychological safety among members and create alignment of how they lived out the organization’s desired values and principles.

The Solution: Grounded in research on trust, psychological safety, and secure attachments in the workplace, we designed and hosted six three-hour team-focused leadership development workshops, as well as various challenges and exercises, and captured insights and observations to process with the team afterward. Each leader also participated in three individual coaching sessions to process their experience and learn how to navigate their own unique needs in service to the organization. The team moved from feeling unclear, distracted, reactive, and burned out to passionate, having high integrity, motivated, and talented. One leader’s feedback read, “You created the exact situation we needed in order to have the conversation we needed to have. I have much more clarity now… I feel like I can move forward.”

Becoming a High Reliability Organization

The Challenge: Due to frequent turnover and a clinical workforce comprised 50% of contractors, an academic health center was challenged with implementing sustainable safety improvements. It sought to formalize its journey toward becoming a high reliability organization and instill a shared sense of accountability for improving patient safety among employees.

The Solution: First, we assessed the organization’s culture of safety and determined gaps by conducting interviews with leaders and employees, evaluating key processes, and reviewing regulatory survey data. Aggregated findings helped identify themes and trends, which informed recommendations that were aligned to high reliability principles. To empower leaders to understand and embrace their role in this journey, they participated in workshops that emphasized fostering psychological safety for near-miss reporting. To make these changes stick, a safety and reliability strategy and process leveraged simplified, shared high reliability language, and a reward and recognition program reinforced employees’ desired behaviors surrounding safety events.

Improving the Patient Experience

The Challenge: An integrated health system sought to consistently respond to patient complaints in a way that improved the overall patient experience and deepened patients’ loyalty with the organization. The responses needed to be empathetic, happen in a timely fashion, and provide value to the patient.

The Solution: To improve service and service recovery throughout the organization, we partnered to co-create a strategy and activation blueprint for a new department of patient relations. This department was intentionally designed to be separate of risk management to ensure each specific type and complexity of patient issue was handled by employees who have the appropriate expertise and skillset. A roadmap supported communication of the desired objectives as well as implementation of the primary goals outlined in the design. The new structure and workflow enabled employees to problem solve in the moment, and unsolved problems were now addressed by a system-wide process that’s standardized, empathetic, and measurable.

HEALTHCARE awards & recognition

BEST USE OF BLENDED LEARNING BEST ADVANCE IN LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT • BEST UNIQUE OR INNOVATIVE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM • BEST CERTIFICATION PROGRAM • BEST INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY STRATEGY

WHAT OUR PARTNERS ARE saying

I’ve worked with so many consulting groups… TiER1 is the best at getting at ‘us’ from the inside out instead of the outside in. Others have us use their methods/toolsan outside-in approach. It has been so fascinating… you lay bare ‘us.’

– Executive Chair of Department of Medicine, Integrated Health System

I LOVE our time together with TiER1—I truly feel that this is going to bring the team to a better place.

– Chief Nursing Officer, Integrated Health System

This program has pushed our leaders beyond boundaries, breaking down silos and driving innovation to go to the next level in leadership. Partnering with TiER1 was instrumental in the work we are forging with leadership growth and development.

– Director of Learning and Organizational Development, Nonprofit Health System with 1,400 care locations

ADDITIONAL resources

The Importance of Leading with Love in the Workplace

The Importance of Leading with Love in the Workplace

“Love” is a word not often heard in office hallways or conference rooms—and likely not in many hospitals—but it has a strong influence on workplace outcomes. Although indicators suggest that those who perceive greater affection and caring from their colleagues perform...