If we learned anything during the pandemic, it was that organizations must switch to a multi-disciplinary care team in order to survive in a dynamic healthcare environment. Understanding how time is being utilized by clinical and non-clinical support staff is crucial to evolve and transform an organization, and a key to this is an ability to review hour breakdowns.
With job growth in the healthcare sector up slightly - the industry added a total of roughly 70,000 jobs in July - signs are pointing to some recovery coming out of the pandemic. Challenges remain with recruitment and retention, so hospitals need to track staff productivity and hours worked to ease previously seen burnout woes and ensure critical care is given through healthy team dynamics. Increased use cases of contract/agency workforce exacerbated labor costs with higher-than-normal rates. While market indicators show a decline in these rates, the impact remains and will be felt for some time from a margin perspective.
How do organizations stay ahead of all these challenges? Is it possible to bring all of these data elements together to provide actionable insights? The key is interoperability between systems, a challenge that has plagued healthcare systems for decades.
Let us consider key data elements required for a labor productivity solution:
This data can come from very disparate systems, making integration and consumption difficult - systems like Payroll, Human Capital Management (HCM), Budget, Contract/Agency to name just a few. Having a solution/tool that can integrate varying data elements is step one in the process.
Great, I got my data figured out. Now what? Turn that data into action! Gone are the days of printed, static reports that are simply numbers that do not really tell a story. You need to interact with your data, converse with it, and leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to help predict what is happening in the data. Nursing managers and financial operation teams are being asked to do more with less. They do not have time to force interpretations - that is why visualizations are a must, so you can see anomalies or behaviors with the data quickly.
Your labor productivity solution should allow you to correct undesirable behaviors in clinical staff by providing line-of-sight to key metrics daily for clear visualizations and calculations that help you understand what those corrective actions should be. Our healthcare team can assess your challenges and help you implement an enterprise labor productivity solution through an assessment workshop.
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