Rene Letourneau, the editor of Healthcare Finance News, recently reached out to Avantas for our perspective on automated staff messaging tools. She was working on an article that highlighted the ability of some of our competitors’ healthcare scheduling software offerings to automatically blast messages to staff members when an ill call is entered into the system.
The feedback we gave her essentially turned the story on its head.
We told Rene that while Smart Square, our staff scheduling and productivity tool, is certainly capable of sending out mass notifications via text, email, and voicemail (based on the user’s preference), our research has demonstrated that automated, mass communications are the least effective way of filling an immediate need.
Our staffing office research has found that contacting staff members who have expressed an interest in working and personally speaking with them has a better pick-up success rate than contacting/messaging employees frequently. While text messaging has been proven effective immediately after implementing the protocol, this “brute force” approach erodes staff participation over time, as they elect to ignore the repeated requests.
We have found the order of long-term effectiveness in getting staff to fill immediate needs is as follows:
Most effective: Staff members are contacted personally by someone whom their decision directly affects, such as a manager or staff coordinator.
Less effective: Personal contact by someone they do not personally know.
Least effective: Automated communication.
We explained to Rene that the best-practice response to ill calls is to anticipate them and have resources in place to meet needs as they develop. This speaks to the need to strategically layer resources to be able to adjust to the ebb and flow of patient demand and staff behaviors. It’s not solely a matter of having a tool in place that will solve the problem. Tools need effective strategies to work properly.
Rene wrote a terrific, balanced article:
Automated Staff Messaging Tools Seen as Boon by Some, not by Others
Click here to read it now.
To learn more about Smart Square or how we help our clients implement tailored, best-practice strategies email me at jackie.larson@avantas.com.