RETAIN at Work: Success Stories

Provider Engagement Success Story

Tapping Health Care Champions By enlisting local health care “champions” to join and advocate for its program, and staying attuned to the needs of medical practices, RETAIN Kentucky has taken a winning approach to building and expanding a collaborative referral network.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS Unlike established government programs that benefit from a built-in customer base, brand new initiatives can face start-up challenges. In the case of RETAIN, those challenges include connecting with newly injured or ill worker participants and communicating the value of return-to-work services to people who may not even realize they can benefit from them.

Kentucky is participating in “RETAIN"—which stands for the Retaining Employment and Talent After Injury/Illness Network. RETAIN states are building connections and improving coordination among employers, health care providers, and other key parties to help newly injured and ill workers stay in the workforce. RETAIN Kentucky is led by the Kentucky Department of Workforce Investment in coordination with several partners.

The U.S. Department of Labor, in collaboration with the Social Security Administration, is sponsoring RETAIN.

Such was the case for RETAIN Kentucky, which instantly set out to build a fruitful referral and enrollment pipeline for its program.

After all, without participant referrals, they would have no injured or ill workers to serve. After initially focusing on employer outreach, the team soon recognized they already had the key to a rich referral source right at hand: existing relationships with influential local health care leaders. So, they decided to capitalize on those relationships and form an ever-expanding, informal network of committed health care partners. Today, these partners not only refer eligible participants to the program, but also apply a “return-to-work” mindset to their everyday work.

“We learned the power and potential of recruiting health care champions early on,” says Shirley Kron, RETAIN Kentucky Recruitment Lead. As a certified occupational health nurse consultant with 40 years of experience in the field, Kron helped RETAIN forge important relationships with the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PMR) faculty and residents at the University of Louisville (UofL). Those relationships alone brought them access to 700 multi-specialty physicians, one of whom emerged as RETAIN Kentucky’s first health care champion. Thanks to doors opened by that doctor, the program’s Return-to-Work Coordinator soon began attending PMR clinics and “Grand Rounds” meetings of physicians and medical students, which helped the coordinator meet referred patients in a clinical setting and enroll them in RETAIN.

Additional relationships and opportunities followed as other PMR physicians connected RETAIN Kentucky staff to physicians in other UofL specialties, such as orthopedics and primary care. “One successful relationship led to another,” says Kron. “Today, we work with four champions in various specialty areas. In addition to delivering RETAIN presentations to their colleagues, they’ve provided input on our outreach materials and helped us fine-tune our health care message and approach.”

RETHINKING THE APPROACH When RETAIN Kentucky first got underway, recruiting health care champions was not a core part of the plan. “We envisioned targeting employers in our initial planning process, but by the time we were in the implementation phase, we saw the wisdom of primarily targeting health care providers given our focus on non-work-related injuries and illnesses,” says Kron. So, in the spirit of continuous quality improvement, the team’s approach to building a referral pipeline evolved to focus on treating physicians who, in their everyday work caring for patients, predictably encounter people who might benefit from RETAIN. The approach has since expanded to include not just physicians, but also nurses, therapists, and social workers within health care organizations.

KNOWING THE AUDIENCE Kron and her team believe their ability to win over health care providers begins with shared values, trust, and credibility. Their champion model begins by building rapport with carefully targeted clinicians and positioning RETAIN as an “information partner” that can help them serve their patients better. This approach reflects Kron’s sensitivity to the administrative burdens that provider practices face today—insight that is based on her personal familiarity with medical office systems, wants, and needs. “Our goal is to lighten their load and help them serve their patients better, so we developed our project’s referral process with their existing administrative and patient-care workflows in mind,” she says.

Kron researches a prospective clinician’s specialty before meeting with them and adapts the portrayal of RETAIN to their particular interests. Recognizing that providers’ time is limited, she also comes to every meeting equipped with a succinct and informative RETAIN fact sheet that she can leave behind.

MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL VALUE For Kron and her team, securing the buy-in of health care providers involves appealing to shared values, offering to make their jobs easier, and being willing to adapt RETAIN processes to their needs.

“Their engagement is essential to achieving the goals of returning individuals to work as quickly as possible or increasing the likelihood of them staying at work,” she says.

Providers recognize the value of RETAIN Kentucky as well, to both their practices and patients. Kron says that every health care professional she talks with says the program is filling an important gap in patient care. In fact, 85 percent of referrals to the program have come from clinical practices in the informal network, which is a testament to their buy-in to the promise of RETAIN: that early intervention is the key to helping patients get better and back to work after injury or illness.

This document was prepared for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Office of Disability Employment Policy and Retaining Employment and Talent After Injury/Illness Network (RETAIN) state grantees, by the American Institutes for Research under DOL Contract Number 1605DC-18-F-00429. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to DOL, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement of same by the U.S. Government.

July 2020