5 Lessons from Joyce University on Building Clinical Operations That Can Scale

When a nursing program plans for enrollment growth, clinical capacity must be part of the plan.

More students mean more placements to secure, more schedules to coordinate, more requirements to track, and more clinical partners to develop. At some point, the processes that worked for a few hundred students have to change.

I recently spoke with Ivette Matias, Vice President of Clinical Operations and Business Development at Joyce University of Nursing and Health Sciences, about how her team has approached that transition. Joyce now supports approximately 2,500–2,600 students, with a clinical footprint spanning 17 states, and plans to double its student population within the next five years.

You can watch our full conversation on demand to hear Ivette share how Joyce is building clinical operations to support the university’s continued growth.

What interested me most was how Joyce is preparing for growth before it arrives. Ivette and her team are building the clinical capacity, partnerships, and infrastructure to support more students while maintaining the quality and consistency of their clinical experiences.

Here are five lessons from our conversation that other nursing programs can consider as they plan for growth.

1. Plan for Clinical Placement Growth Before Current Processes Reach Their Limits

Joyce University started where many nursing programs do: Microsoft Excel.

As Ivette explained:

“Most programs do start in an Excel spreadsheet. Excel can be a very powerful tool, but it has its limitations, and scale is one of them.”

At a few hundred students, spreadsheets were manageable. At 2,500–2,600 students, they could stretch to 28 or 30 tabs.

As those spreadsheets grew, so did the risk of something being missed or disrupted. A changed filter could affect placement information, and knowledge of how the spreadsheet worked could depend on one person. If that person was unavailable, the team could lose visibility into student placements, site details, and what still needed to be completed.

For Joyce, growth made it clear that clinical placement information needed a more reliable home. It’s a useful question for any nursing program preparing to grow: What happens to the processes you’re using today when enrollment increases? If adding students also adds more spreadsheets, emails, manual updates, and staff coordination, it may be time to plan for a different approach.

2. Build Safeguards into Clinical Placement Management as You Grow

Centralizing clinical placement information gave Joyce opportunities to automate work that had become difficult to manage at its size.

Student communication is one example. Previously, the clinical team sent individual emails telling students where they were placed, when they needed to be there, and other placement details. With ~2,500 students, that could mean thousands of individual emails.

Now, the team creates and confirms a placement in CORE for Nursing and it automatically notifies the student. Students can log in to see their placement information and requirements in one place. Placement information also moves from CORE for Nursing to Joyce's SIS, giving teams such as Student Affairs and the Registrar access to clinical information in a system they already use.

Centralization also helped Joyce reduce risk.

Ivette described how contract information and placement information had previously been handled by different teams. That left room for a student to potentially arrive at a clinical facility without an active agreement in place.

Today, Joyce's active clinical sites are maintained in CORE for Nursing. If a student sees a placement there, the team knows Joyce has an affiliation agreement with that facility.

As enrollment grows, safeguards like these help Joyce manage greater volume without increasing the risk of a missed step.

3. Give Nursing Leaders Better Visibility into Clinical Operations

Ivette oversees Joyce’s day-to-day clinical operations while maintaining a broader view of what’s happening across the program.

What placements have been made? What is still needed? Where does Joyce have clinical capacity? Where might the university need to build more clinical capacity?

In the past, getting answers to questions like these could mean working through spreadsheets or asking someone on the team to pull information together.

Today, Ivette can access reports herself, filter the information she needs, and get a broader view of clinical operations without asking her team to stop what they're doing to create another report.

As she told us, she wants her team spending its time “supporting students and building relationships with sites.”

4. Connect Enrollment Goals to Clinical Capacity Before the Need Arrives

Joyce compares enrollment forecasts with its clinical footprint across 17 states to see where future demand may exceed available capacity. That gives Ivette’s team time to build new clinical partnerships before those placements are needed.

The team also looks at the types of clinical settings available in each area to help provide students with consistent clinical opportunities regardless of where they live.

The data also gives Ivette something concrete to bring into conversations with other Joyce leaders. If her team encounters barriers or needs additional resources to build clinical capacity in a particular area, she can show where the need exists and why.

5. Choose Clinical Education Technology That Can Support Future Growth

As Joyce prepares to serve more students, Ivette knows the university’s clinical technology needs will continue to evolve. That makes the relationship behind the technology important, too.

Ivette has worked with several clinical placement platforms throughout her career. One difference she pointed to in her experience with CORE for Nursing is her ability to talk directly with people beyond her customer success manager.

“What I will say is that at CORE, I'm able to have access to product and development teams. I'm able to have conversations, share my strategic needs with that business development focus, share ideas that I have to automate or to add additional attributes, and the responsiveness in that dialogue has been just instrumental in my ability to be able to grow the department to be what I need it to be to meet the demand of enrollment that is coming.”

Technology features matter, of course. But if your program is growing, it's also worth asking what happens when your needs change. Can you talk openly with your technology partner about where you're headed? Will they listen when you identify a new need? Can the relationship evolve along with your program?

Build Clinical Education Infrastructure Before Growth Demands It

Joyce expects to double its student population within five years. The work Ivette and her team are doing now is helping make sure clinical operations are ready to support that future.

For nursing programs with growth on the horizon, Joyce’s experience offers a useful question to ask early: Will the clinical infrastructure we have today support the program we’re planning to become?

Answering that question before enrollment grows gives clinical leaders more time to strengthen processes, build capacity, and prepare their teams for what comes next.