In the midst of an unprecedented shortage of healthcare professionals, workforce recruitment and retention has been pushed to the top of provider organizations’ priority lists. In this fiercely competitive climate, hospital leadership should be focused on how to best utilize their workforce to keep up with the growing patient demand while continuing to deliver quality patient care. To do this, they must focus on their staffing and scheduling practices.
As labor costs account for more than half of provider organizations’ expenditures, identifying operational metrics to improve can produce significant cost savings. With several factors impacting workforce operations, hospital leadership sometimes struggles with where to start. Maybe some units feel they are constantly understaffed but their labor costs are skyrocketing and they can’t pinpoint the reason.
A good place to start is with a comprehensive overview of their staffing costs and opportunities by analyzing current workforce metrics. Focus should be put on specific operational metrics such as floating, cancellations, overtime, FTE leakage, and hiring targets to highlight areas of opportunity. Examining your workforce metrics uncovers what a unit is capable of given current constraints and operating procedures. This insight can help determine what initiatives should be undertaken to reach operational goals.
A monthly refresh of these metrics through the use of an online analytics dashboard allows leadership to track improvement toward their goals. Delivering metrics and schedule outcomes on a consistent timeline tells the story of an organization’s performance and illustrates opportunities to maximize existing staff.
Viewing key metrics to track against goals, an analytics dashboard allows you to explore patterns, determine root causes, and glean actionable insights from your operational data all in one location. The online dashboard aggregates data from several sources so that leadership from all areas have a holistic view of current workforce operations.
Allowing leaders to drill down into specific metrics gives insights into their current workforce state and allows them to set targets and build workforce plans. Not intended to monitor daily operations and productivity, a workforce analytics dashboard gives leaders the tools to set and monitor the overall strategy for organizational workforce planning.
A visual representation of your operational data paints a clear picture of how you are utilizing your staff, including the costs for each labor source. Understanding how you are using core and contingency staff will reveal if you have the appropriate levels of each type.
Not to be overwhelmed by data, being well versed in workforce management strategies and having access to a consulting partner is critical to gleaning insightful and actionable information from your data. Your partnership with this expert helps you identify key optimization opportunities and guidance on how to apply best practice strategies to improve clinical and financial outcomes.