White Paper
White Paper: Remedy Your Scheduling Pains — And Meet Financial, Clinical, And Operational Goals
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•White Paper: Remedy Your Scheduling Pains — And Meet Financial, Clinical, And Operational Goals
By Kronos Inc.
Despite healthcare's embrace of cutting-edge clinical technology, it's not uncommon today to find hospital managers drafting work schedules on paper before transferring them to simple spreadsheets or stand-alone scheduling systems. In building a manual schedule, somehow the manager must keep track of its many elements: average daily patient census, mandated nurse-patient ratios, employee skill mix, union and regulatory requirements, the hospital's own labor policies, and the department's budget. In addition, the needs of individual employees must be taken into consideration. As managers create the schedule, they must balance employee skills, seniority, and shift preferences. Then there are the constant adjustments to accommodate vacancies and requests for time off, vacations, and leave. By this time, managers have devoted hours to creating the schedule — only to see it disrupted the day it goes into effect.
Think about it. On a typical day, a manager might be confronted with myriad unexpected situations. Two employees call in sick a few hours before their shifts start. The census and acuity report that day shows that the outbreak of flu is more severe than expected. Labor and Delivery is having an extremely busy day. And an email warning that a nurse's certification has expired has just arrived. Managers working with a manual or partially automated staffing process face a nearly impossible task of quickly responding with the right number of skilled workers to match continually changing workload volumes.And it doesn't stop there. Scheduling and staffing demand managers' constant attention as they field requests for time off for the next scheduling period while working on today's staffing needs. The processes are perpetual — managers make the plans and execute them — and are done concurrently. Workforce management solutions with integrated advanced staffing and scheduling capabilities make these tasks easier for managers by providing instant visibility to budget, census, and workload data; employee skills and preferences; and labor costs. Given the right real-time information, managers can react quickly to the unpredictable situations that put a workforce schedule in flux.
Click Here To Download:•White Paper: Remedy Your Scheduling Pains — And Meet Financial, Clinical, And Operational Goals
