Scheduling Software Saves Hospitals Millions In Labor Costs

This case study highlights how five suburban Philadelphia hospitals leveraged automated scheduling and shift management software to balance and redeploy employees internally, saving these facilities millions of dollars each year in temporary contract labor.

Main Line Health employs a clinical staff of over 4,500 full time, per diem and contract professionals who worked about 350,000 shifts and 2.8 million hours to handle more than 300,000 hospital inpatient days and another 160,000 emergency and 920,000 outpatient visits during fiscal year 2010.

“If you try to imagine the sheer complexity of all the human interactions that we’re responsible for,” noted Nancy Valentine, Main Line’s Chief Nursing Officer, “it’s a mind-numbing exercise.”

Prior to 2005, the primary methodology for scheduling shifts at Main Line facilities involved mountains of spreadsheet printouts and tens of thousands of outbound phone calls, messages and return phone calls, plus long hours of back and forth negotiations.

“Scheduling is one of the least satisfying and most time consuming elements of a nurse manager’s job,” Valentine explained. “It is an onerously laborious, expensive process and our operations management knew there had to be a better way to do this.”

In 2005, Main Line’s nursing vice president discovered Concerro’s “Software as a Service” (SaaS) solutions as a technology-enabled means of getting better control of open shift management, incentives and bonuses, premium labor and variable staffing costs. It also offered nurses an easy self-service dashboard to choose their own preferred additional shift work, and ensured more efficient overall management of Main Line’s substantial nursing budget.

Since Concerro was a hosted solution that didn’t require internal IT resources to function, it was easy for Main Line management to complete a quick evaluation of how ShiftSelect could help nurse managers in all five acute care facilities schedule and manage available shifts for their large nursing staffs. Within a brief period, the feedback received was so enthusiastic; decision makers knew that ShiftSelect was the right way to go.

In the years since ShiftSelect was implemented, it has “vastly changed our nursing landscape,” according to Valentine, “because it allows us to maintain a closer partnership with our nurses and give them more freedom to manage their time for extra shifts. Next to salary and fringe benefits, having control over your own schedule is a top priority for nurses in achieving work-life balance and career satisfaction.”

Nurses can access ShiftSelect from any Web browser, anywhere, any time, at the hospital, at home or on the go. They can view a complete listing of available shifts that match their qualifications and synch up with their own availability dates and the preferences of their families. If they want to pick up extra shifts in other Main Line facilities in nearby communities, that’s possible too, with manager pre-approval. Access This Content To Read This Article In Its Entirety.