Providers are faced with multiple challenges<\/a> when attempting to manage their workforce.\u00a0 As with many industries, there is natural tension between managing costs and providing a good patient experience.\u00a0 All too often though, we see healthcare providers achieving the worst of all cases \u2013 escalating costs while simultaneously getting low marks for an unsatisfactory patient experience.<\/p>\n The single largest costs for any healthcare provider is people.\u00a0 Employee costs average about 54% of the total annual expenditures for any given provider.\u00a0 Layered on top of this fact is that most providers have insufficient tools for their business operations people to accurately track, report and easily adapt to changes in patient service demand.\u00a0 There is often no way to see into the patient flow or workforce to determine how the business is managing costs, people, or the patient experience.<\/p>\n Do any of these sound familiar?<\/p>\n Unfortunately, these inefficiencies are a direct result of workforce imbalance and their inherent costs have negative implications to healthcare organizations and their patients.\u00a0 Let\u2019s look at some of the challenges healthcare providers face a little closer.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Many providers to this day schedule some of their most highly skilled resources (nurses, lab technicians, and many others) with excel spreadsheets.\u00a0 This, largely, is an evolution of finding a tool that worked with low ramp time for learning.\u00a0 There are myriad problems with this approach.<\/p>\n There is no real way to assess who is available and adjust for any changes in staffing \u2013 such as someone calling in sick.\u00a0 As the number of employees grows, so too does the complexity of managing workload manually. \u00a0Providers with 160 nurses can spend 80 hours manually managing their schedules.\u00a0 While this keeps people on the floor, it does nothing to enhance flexibility to adapt to changes in patient demand.\u00a0\u00a0 This inevitably leads to patient frustration and unmanageable bottlenecks in patient flow throughout the care center.\u00a0 Further, there is limited visibility for management, and there is frequently no good way to\u2026<\/p>\n Another vexing issue operations faces is staff churn.\u00a0 Churn is a particularly insidious problem.\u00a0 Generally, hospitals see a shocking 43% churn in employees annually.\u00a0 This not only costs the organization due to high recruiting efforts, but it also has significant negative impact on employee engagement which will often flow through to the patient experience.<\/p>\n Another very costly area of inefficiency is misalignment of patient load and staff availability<\/a>.\u00a0 Patients regularly experience long wait times throughout the cycle of care.\u00a0\u00a0 This is caused by several factors, including lack of visibility of the overall experience from patient admittance to discharge.\u00a0 This is compounded by inability to forecast the patient load to the available workforce.<\/p>\n Providers are continually frustrated by having multiple systems with patient information but none can manage the patient flow throughout the care experience.\u00a0 This leads to regular redundancies in data collection and no visibility to the patient\u2019s experience through the process.\u00a0 Further, there is no way for operations resources to determine what\u2019s working and what\u2019s not working with the patient flow.<\/p>\n Healthcare providers are realizing that they need to take steps to automate processes like scheduling, forecasting and workflow balance and gain reporting and visibility into the entire patient journey to match staffing to patient demand.<\/p>\n One example we\u2019ve observed is a healthcare provider invested in a workforce management and analytics solution that enabled supervisors to forecast, plan and automate scheduling for the changing patient demand. The analytics solution gave visibility to costs associated with scheduling to optimize employee placement based on outcomes. Hospital employees submit scheduling needs online or by phone and supervisors schedule by skill and patient demand. \u00a0\u00a0This reduced administrative schedule costs by 90%, provided dramatically more flexibility for nurses to meet patient demand and gave the operations team data visibility to provide better care outcomes.<\/p>\n In another case, a hospital system desperately needed to reduce staff churn.\u00a0 They used the reporting from a workforce management solution to understand the staff to patient loads across the hospital. This enabled them to increase hiring and staffing in compacted departments, which had a positive effect on both staff and patients. In tandem, a quality assurance tool allowed supervisors to see the skills that staff needed help with and offer training to increase productivity.<\/p>\n There are pockets of successful hospitals, within the broad ecosystem of healthcare providers, that are attempting to address the workforce issues.\u00a0 It often takes someone who sees and owns the many painful challenges to step forward on the hospital operations team and drive change.\u00a0 Those that quickly realize that the tools and solutions to help manage staffing and patient flow challenges offer more reward than effort increase patient and employee engagement.<\/p>\n If you would like to learn\u00a0how hospitals are bringing an end to operational inefficiency,\u00a0read our report<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>or download our competitive analysis<\/a> of workforce optimization solution providers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s time to pull back the drapes and shed light on pervasive hospital inefficiencies. Inefficiencies in patient flow and workforce are deeply eroding the profitability of many, if not most healthcare providers.\u00a0 Even medium sized hospitals (3,000 employees) can be spending almost $200M on a highly skilled workforce that is very inefficiently allocated to patient […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1370,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[24,26,34,35],"class_list":["post-1362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cx-strategy","category-enterprise-cx","tag-healthcare","tag-patient-experience","tag-patient-flow","tag-staff-churn"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why is this happening?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Hospital](\"https:\/\/ptpinc.com\/staging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/iStock_000083363285_Medium-300x200.jpg\")
Providers are faced with multiple challenges when attempting to manage their workforce to meet the patient workload.\u00a0 These challenges are manifested by all too common frustrations.<\/p>\n\n
Operations Challenge: Manual Scheduling Processes <\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n
The end result to hospital inefficiency is some of the best, brightest and most dedicated people are disadvantaged by a lack of ability to:<\/h3>\n
\n
Operations Challenge: Staff Churn <\/strong><\/h3>\n
\nOperations Challenge: Misaligned Patient Load to Staff Availability \u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\nSo… what are healthcare organizations doing?<\/strong><\/h3>\n