A new year is when a lot of agencies decide this is the year training finally gets fixed. It's a good instinct. It also tends to produce goals that are either too vague to act on or too ambitious to actually stick, which is why so many training initiatives quietly fade by spring. Realistic goals, built around how clinical judgment actually develops, tend to hold up a lot better.
Here's how to set staffing and training goals that are specific enough to actually work.
Before setting a training goal, get a real picture of where your clinicians currently stand, not a general sense but an actual breakdown by clinician and by skill area. New hires typically plateau on OASIS scoring after the initial basics, not because they've stopped trying, but because building real judgment takes more repetition and more specific feedback than a standard onboarding period provides. Knowing exactly where each clinician's plateau sits, whether it's GG functional scoring, risk assessment items, or something else specific, is what turns a training goal from generic to actionable.
A common but weak goal is "increase training hours for new hires." A stronger goal is "make sure every new hire gets specific feedback on real charts within 48 hours of a scoring inconsistency." The research on skill development is fairly consistent here: fast, specific feedback builds judgment faster than occasional, general feedback, even at the same total volume of training time. A goal built around feedback speed and specificity is more likely to actually move the needle than one built purely around hours logged.
Given how consistently elevated turnover runs in this industry, a staffing goal that assumes a stable team all year is planning for a scenario that's unlikely to hold. A more realistic goal accounts for turnover directly: building a faster, more structured ramp-up process for new hires specifically, since the documentation quality dip that follows a departure is largely a function of how quickly a replacement clinician can build real judgment, not just how quickly a seat gets filled.
Raises and new hires are the most direct way to improve retention, but most agencies don’t have spare budget sitting around to pay for them. One practical place to find it is in operational costs that technology can cut without lowering quality. Switching from a legacy coding and QA vendor to Olli, for example, brings that spend down to roughly half the cost, while certified expert coders and clinical AI deliver better accuracy and faster turnaround than human-only or AI-only services. One agency we work with cut its coding and QR costs by 75 percent without sacrificing quality. Put those savings back into salary increases for the clinicians you most want to keep, and into the hires that support revenue growth, like an added clinician to take on more referrals or a QA lead who can run the feedback loop in this plan. That way retention and growth get funded by the savings instead of competing with the rest of the budget.
A training goal that quietly depends on your DON absorbing every one-off correction personally isn't sustainable, especially given how much of a DON's time already goes to exactly this kind of chart question. Build a goal around what specifically needs a DON's direct involvement versus what a structured QA feedback loop can handle on its own, so training improvement doesn't just become one more thing competing for the same limited hours.
It's easy for a training goal to focus exclusively on new clinicians, since their learning curve is the most visible. But experienced clinicians benefit from a structured feedback loop too, and skipping them in the plan misses a real opportunity. Scoring habits can drift quietly over years without anyone flagging it, simply because an experienced clinician stops getting the kind of specific feedback a newer hire receives by default. A goal that includes periodic, specific feedback for your whole team, not just the newest members, catches this kind of slow drift before it becomes a real pattern across your most senior staff.
This also changes how the goal feels internally. A training initiative that only targets new hires can read as remedial. One that includes everyone reads as a genuine investment in accuracy across the board, which tends to get better buy-in from the team overall.
By the end of the year, you should be able to answer a specific question: did new hires reach independent, consistent scoring faster than they did the year before, and can you point to the data that shows it. If the goal can't be checked against something concrete, it's not really a goal, it's an intention, and intentions are exactly what tend to quietly disappear by spring.
We'd like to show you how our QA process can support faster, more specific feedback for your newer clinicians, without adding more to your DON's plate.