The Benefits office serves more than 50,000 employees throughout Partners HealthCare.  The Office’s dedicated staff provide employees with a wide range of benefits services that include plan design, compliance, communication, PeopleSoft recordkeeping, administration, and service center support for all medical, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance coverage, flexible spending accounts, pension, tax-sheltered annuity plans and retirement savings.

Bulfinch Temporary Service (BFT) places highly skilled temporary employees whose diversity, energy and positive attitudes have helped countless departments throughout Partners to meet their commitment to quality patient care, research and administration.  In addition, BFT provides a skilled temporary workforce to Partners institutions at a very cost effective overhead rate.

Child Care Services provides high quality, developmentally appropriate and cost effective child care options to Partners employees, patients and members of the community in the form of center-based child care and backup child care.  In addition, Child Care Services oversees the relationship between Partners and Parents in a Pinch, which provides in home backup child care and nanny search and placement options.

In support of the Partners HR Service Delivery Model, the Compensation group provides consultation and direct support in a variety of areas including, in part: wage program design/implementation, market analysis/forecasting, benchmarking/scorecard development, internal/external trending, workforce development, records management, PeopleSoft HR technical support, HR/Human Capital Management initiatives and HR compliance and training.

The Employee and Labor Relations (ER/LR) department provides consulting and advisory support to the Human Resources departments throughout Partners and its institutions, as well as to leadership and employees across the system.  The ER/LR mission is to ensure fair and equal treatment of all employees with a view toward helping leaders proactively address issues to prevent escalation of workplace conflict.

The Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is a nationally accredited and award-winning EAP. The EAP is a voluntary, free work-life benefit that provides confidential consultation, assessment, short-term counseling, information and referrals for employees, staff and their household members, and students of the Institute of Health Professions (IHP). Professional, masters-level, licensed EAP consultants, who are familiar with the healthcare workplace, provide private and safe assistance for all types of work/life, family, mental health or personal concerns, and can make referrals to treatment or many other community resources.  Working from a problem-solving approach, the EAP offers consultation and solution-oriented recommendations. The EAP’s top priority is the healthy balance between personal and professional lives from employment through retirement.  Staff expertise includes, but is not limited to:  stressors of daily living, family and relationship concerns, substance abuse and mental health issues, domestic violence, eldercare, child care, disability, cultural diversity and work-life issues.  The EAP is also a workplace based resource that provides consultation and training to the workplace regarding the impact and resolution of behavioral/mental health and productivity problems.

Employee Programs develops, plans and implements a variety of highly visible Partners HealthCare and system-wide strategic employee recognition programs and initiatives that support, promote and enhance the Partners culture throughout the entire system, including the Partners in Excellence awards program, Partners HealthCare Employee Service Celebration, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Luncheon and Partners HealthCare Take Our Children to Work Day.

Ensuring that Partners employees are kept healthy and productive, the Ergonomics Program strives to recognize ergonomic hazards in the workplace and recommend solutions for the prevention or reduction of these hazards using engineering or administrative controls, in conjunction with individual behavioral changes. The Ergonomics team members are experts in an area of study focusing on human movement, musculoskeletal function and how humans interact with their environment. They apply this knowledge to evaluate the workplace and help make employees’ more comfortable and their jobs safer and more efficient.

The Executive Compensation department is responsible for Partners and institutional compensation committees, executive agreements, market data and comparisons, executive compensation and benefit analyses, and system-wide information regarding leadership compensation. The department is also a resource for tax filings, executive compensation information, market research, and other special executive compensation/benefit programs.

The HR Financial Management and Data Analytics team supports all institutions across Partners HealthCare regarding fringe benefit budgeting and financial management.  In addition, the team supports the self insured employee health insurance population analytics.

Human Resources Administration is responsible for the oversight of all Human Resources activities across the Partners network, organized around a local business partner/central specialist model.  Specialized services are provided across the network by subject-matter experts for specific high-level HR functional services. This framework ensures that HR is positioned to align services to the strategic mission of both Partners and the local organization and is able to balance system needs with those of the academic, community and specialty hospitals as well as the physician networks. 

The HRIS corporate consulting team is responsible for the design and implementation of new HR systems and the enhancement of existing applications. HRIS provides systems support to multiple systems, including PeopleSoft and Kronos. Support services include implementations, conversions, configuration, interfaces, reports, production support, training, system fixes and upgrades.

The Professional Staff Benefits Office (PSBO) serves the professional staff (monthly paid physicians and PhDs) and trainee (residents and fellows) communities with respect to onboarding and benefits administration.

The mission of Occupational Health Service is to protect and promote the health, safety and well being of employees and their work environment.  OHS physicians, nurse practitioners and nurses are experts at identifying occupational risks, performing medical surveillance and providing preventative wellness services, such as vaccinations.  OHS providers treat occupational exposure injury and illness with a focus on restoring work capacity and minimizing the impact of these events on employees' well being and lives. Additionally, the department provides consultation to the health care facilities and their managers related to occupational risks and compliance with workplace health and safety standards.

Organization Development and Learning Services (OD&L) helps PHS employees at all levels to work well with their teams by offering a wide range of services, including large-scale change projects affecting hundreds of employees across several departments; independent “consultations” to small groups, including: teambuilding, executive and management coaching, retreat and focus group facilitation, etc.; and training services ranging from management and communication workshops to delivery of the Professional Development Series.

Partners Office for International Professionals & Students (PIPS) works with all Partners institutions, departments and government agencies and organizations to manage compliance with immigration-related rules and regulations and to facilitate the visa processing of all international researchers, physicians and allied health personnel.

A division of the Compensation group, the HR PeopleSoft Services/Records Management team provides PeopleSoft support and training to HR staff and managers for all PHS affiliates. The team is also responsible for the maintenance of employee records for MGH and PHS, as well as other employee records-related functions throughout the organization.

The Professional Staff Compensation Office serves as a system wide resource for physician compensation questions, including support to departments in development of their practice plans. The Office also administers MGPO professional staff compensation transactions, staffs the MGPO Compensation Committee, performs physician compensation analyses, and issues annual compensation and benefit statements to MGPO professional staff.

Partners Recruitment Support Services provides applicant tracking system support to HR departments and their applicants throughout the recruitment process, and provides compliance activity support to Partners institutions.

The Talent Acquisition team is committed to partnering with hiring departments in bringing together groups of talented individuals with a diverse range of skills and experience into our distinguished organization.  We represent the “face” of Partners HealthCare, attracting and onboarding talent who not only align with our values, but who will also further unite our culture and advance our mission of delivering optimal patient care at our world-class hospitals.

The Workers’ Compensation Division is staffed by a group of specialists who are experienced in managing workers’ compensation claims for Partners’ self-administered, self-insured workers’ compensation program.  These specialists works in collaboration with members of the Occupational Health Service to ensure that employees who have sustained an occupational injury or illness have their needs fully met in a caring and compassionate manner, including the timely processing of workers’ compensation benefits.  The Workers’ Compensation Division also provides expert consultation on workers’ compensation matters to managers and hospital leadership.

Partners HealthCare Workforce Development represents a collaboration between Human Resources and Community Health. It strives to create career pathways for three “pipeline” groups: youth, community residents and incumbent employees, with the dual goal of providing economic opportunity to program participants while responding to Partners’ need for a highly qualified, diverse workforce. The Partners in Career and Workforce Development (PCWD) program helps to provide training and employment assistance to hundreds of community residents who may not have otherwise had the opportunity to enter the health care field.

In addition to providing academic and career coaching and resources, the WFD team has adopted a strategy of using “technology as an enabler” to create pathways to employment and advancement for all of its pipeline groups. The Partners Virtual Learning Community (VLC) platform, which combines social networking and online learning to create an interactive “social learning” space, helps to provide networking and educational opportunities to all three pipeline groups as well as to a fourth “pipeline,” the Kraft Center for Community Health, a program developed to inspire and create a new generation of Community Health practitioners and leaders.

In addition to our internal efforts, the Partners HealthCare WFD team continues to create pathways to higher education and career advancement for employees by seeking accessible and affordable options for college degree attainment through collaborations with many educational providers, including local community colleges and, most recently, with the College for America (CfA) program from Southern New Hampshire University, which is a fully accredited, non-profit institution that offers innovative, online, employer-informed, competency-based and affordable associate and baccalaureate degree programs.

Workforce Economics provides continually updated financial and operational analysis to develop bargaining positions at Partners’ unionized entities, providing detailed data on issues related to negotiations and settlement impacts, as well as Partners-wide nursing wage adjustment assumptions. The department also maintains databases on local and national nursing expense trends to continually assess risks and opportunities with regard to nursing salary assumptions.