Unlocking Healthcare Career Pathways for High School Students

From high school to the workforce, ACEMAPP assists student development every step of the way!

ACEMAPP has proven time and time again to be the industry leader in providing workforce shortage solutions to hospital systems across the country. The platform had its roots as a digital solution to replace the time-intensive, manual task of managing the clinical rotations of college students studying healthcare. This mission has allowed ACEMAPP to expand its services and provide high school students with a pathway for exploring a healthcare career–the next evolution in supporting a talent pipeline for the healthcare industry.

High school students interested in pursuing career pathways in healthcare can connect with organizations in the early stages of their educational journey. This helps introduce them to new career prospects and allows them to start building relationships with health systems very early on. With this powerful option, clinical sites can more directly support career pathways and be part of growing the healthcare workforce.

Amy Poole, Workforce Development Coordinator at Northeast Georgia Health System (NGHS), has utilized ACEMAPP to streamline students into educational opportunities during their junior and senior years of high school. She notes a steady increase in students year-over-year.

“Since I started my job almost two years ago,” Poole says, “we have increased our students from 50 in 2019-2020 to 92 in 2021-2022, 136 in 2022-2023, and 170 for 2023-2024. Needless to say, I am a popular lady!”

“NGHS has remained committed to the ACEMAPP platform over the years because it is affordable and a well-developed platform that makes the customer experience seamless,” Poole says. “Not enough can be said about their customer service either – our students are often able to solve any problems without me even knowing about it, with [ACEMAPP’s] accessible and responsive Help Desk.”

Most high school students using ACEMAPP in partnership with NGHS are involved in work-based educational programs. These programs provide experiential learning opportunities for students to begin exploring a career in healthcare.

ACEMAPP creates a database for high school students to store previously completed certifications along with medical and educational records. They can also track required training modules. On the back end, students are tracked by their completed education level, where they are from, and other information so that NGHS can track these students as they move into college-level programs and eventually the workforce.

“One aspect that is extremely beneficial to high school students is our internal ability to track the students’ progress after they have left high school,” Poole says. “As the student progresses on their journey, we are able to provide them with relevant information on career fairs and job openings that will help them take the next step from the classroom to the workforce – all on one platform.”



A high school student perspective

For most high school students, the future is uncertain. However, for University of Georgia freshman Alex Brown, ACEMAPP helped bridge the gap from a passive interest in the healthcare field into an active career pursuit.

“ACEMAPP helped speed up my process in high school and getting into the hospital programs,” Brown says. “Without them, you have to go through and get the paperwork done, mail it in, and make sure it gets to the right people. ACEMAPP gave us a digital portal to upload all of the information at once, and made it so that all of the providers, coordinators – anyone who needed access to it – could. This sped up the process and let us get into what we wanted to do quickly.”

Brown is currently working toward a degree in biology, with a minor in Spanish, at UGA. His post-graduate aspirations include one day of training to be an anesthesiology assistant. In his senior year of high school, Brown was involved in a work-based learning program in collaboration with Northeast Georgia Health System’s Gainesville and Braselton branches.

The program allowed Brown and other students to rotate through different care units within the health system to fully experience the nuances of each discipline. Once Alex had submitted all required documentation and assignments in a given period, ACEMAPP would, in exchange, return his rotation assignment for the next month.

“You were able to just submit the documents and then seamlessly receive your next rotation,” Brown says.

These experiences are incredibly valuable for high schoolers interested in the healthcare field but who may be unsure of what steps to take. These connections provide a plethora of opportunities to explore, potentially adding or eliminating possible career routes before ever stepping foot on a college campus. For Brown, these experiences were pivotal in his career exploration.

“Anything that I did through high school would not have been available without ACEMAPP,” Brown says. “Without ACEMAPP, I wouldn’t know what field I would want to go into in the healthcare space. ACEMAPP really opened a lot of doors for me and let me see what the medical field was like while I was still in high school.”

Help your high school student today

ACEMAPP’s services stretch beyond the borders of healthcare systems and college campuses, and getting involved early in the process allows ACEMAPP to provide students with work-based experiences that propel their journey toward a healthcare career forward.

ACEMAPP is constantly growing and looking for new people and organizations to start on the pathway to a career in healthcare. Contact us today to begin your organization’s journey to finding and supporting the next generation of healthcare professionals from start to finish.