Three NOSORH Partners Unite to Address Rural Workforce Challenges
Rural healthcare organizations continue to face persistent workforce challenges — from recruiting qualified staff to retaining them. To help address these realities, three established NOSORH Investing Partners — Wintergreen, United Professional Benefits, and Ameritas — have combined their expertise to create a new company: Gingham Solutions. Gingham helps rural hospitals with workforce strategies focused on recruitment, retention, and long-term financial sustainability.
First, rural hospitals and clinics face a persistent and destabilizing challenge: the revolving door of clinical and executive talent. While many providers begin their careers in rural settings, few stay for the long term. This lack of continuity disrupts patient care and forces hospitals into a costly cycle of constant recruitment. Furthermore, insufficient housing often stalls recruitment efforts entirely.
Gingham’s Align solution addresses these chronic challenges with novel deferred compensation and retirement tools, including methods to finance new housing options for candidates and employees. By removing these barriers and aligning its strategies with long-term, rural-specific vesting models, hospitals can better secure essential talent and institutional knowledge.
Second, rural hospitals often struggle with the high cost of traditional employee benefits that fail to leverage their own local care networks. Gingham developed a unique self-funded health plan model designed specifically for rural providers and markets. This approach helps keep healthcare dollars within the local community while encouraging employees to utilize services at their local hospital. Pairing these benefits with long-term retention tools – including deferred compensation (Gingham Align) and enhanced retirement programs (Gingham Retire) – gives hospitals greater financial stability and encourages providers to commit to a full career in a rural setting.
SORH may find particular value in how these strategies help stabilize the rural workforce. Additional tools, including student loan paydowns, support the long-term commitments necessary to sustain local care and address pay disparities that often lure talent toward urban centers.
Gingham’s workforce model aligns with the Workforce Development priority of the Rural Hospital Transformation Program (RHTP), which encourages states to invest in recruiting and retaining clinical talent with commitments of five years or more. Gingham Align helps structure these RHTP investments into tangible incentives, thereby increasing the likelihood that public dollars yield lasting staffing solutions.
To explore these strategies in practice, Gingham will host a webinar on Monday, April 13th, at 2:00 PM ET. Registration details will be available soon. For additional information, contact Greg Wolf at gwolf@ginghamsolutions.com.