📍Roseburg, Oregon

Expanding Rural Healthcare Workforce Development in Oregon

Challenge:

Aviva Health faced ongoing workforce shortages driven by difficulty recruiting and retaining staff, limited resources for innovation, and fragmented training pathways. Aviva needed more structured, sustainable workforce development strategies to build a long-term pipeline for clinicians and support existing staff. 

Solution:

With Bureau of Health Workforce support, and in partnership with their local Area Health Education Center, Aviva Health launched an integrated workforce development strategy that aligned their allied health fellowships, behavioral health internships, medical student rotations, and rural family medicine residency. Their strategy included the following features:  

• Collaborative training: Strengthened clinical experiences through partnerships with academic institutions such as Oregon Health and Science University and Western University to provide rotations, clerkships, and sub-internships that immerse learners in rural clinical practice. 
• Talent pathways: Created early-exposure programs, including the ReConnect Fellowship (full-time medical assistant and scribe roles for pre-med students) and the E2L program (guaranteed employment, scholarships, and wraparound supports) to build long-term interest in rural health careers. 
• Community engagement: Implemented cohort-based training structures and community integration activities to increase learner satisfaction, promote local ownership of the workforce pipeline, and reduce burnout among trainees entering rural practice. 
• Program synchronization: Aligned multiple workforce programs into a unified strategy (“Aviva’s Workforce Development Engine”), which aimed to improve efficiency, reinforce shared goals, and ensure coordinated touchpoints along the recruitment and retention pipeline.
• Quality tracking: Enhanced data tracking through acceptance-rate monitoring, trend analytics, continuous feedback loops, and readiness assessments to identify gaps and inform program improvements.

Impact:
✅ Increased student engagement and workforce program efficiency.
✅ Strengthened community partnerships and local retention.
✅ Created long-term mentorship and career pathways.