The Emergence Of The Electronic Employee Record

By J.P. Fingado, API Healthcare

With electronic health records (EHRs) and healthcare reform dominating industry news, healthcare executives have been swept into a whirlwind of dynamic decision making and changing priorities. Yet, the primary business of healthcare providers – high quality patient care– remains unchanged. In the ongoing battle to confront profitability issues while improving the quality of patient care, healthcare providers are searching for ways to reduce the costs of doing business and improve bottom-line performance. Considering the single biggest operating expense for health systems is the cost of labor, it makes good financial sense to optimize your most valuable resource – your employees. But, it’s making the connection between workforce management best practices and improvement in patient quality of care metrics that moves a healthcare provider from acceptable patient outcomes to outstanding patient outcomes.

It is the quality of the caregivers, especially the nursing staff, and how that professional staff is utilized, that has a significant impact on patient outcomes. As healthcare reform shines the spotlight on both quality and cost, many healthcare providers are making workforce optimization a priority. That’s leading to a new strategy surrounding employee data – the electronic employee record™ (EER), which entails storing, managing and maintaining all employee information in a single, fully integrated suite of solutions.

The electronic employee record replaces disparate systems and incomplete information with a more complete organizational workforce management picture. Employee-related information from throughout the enterprise – and even from supplemental and contingent staffing sources– can be used to review, identify, manage and maintain processes more effectively for the entire workforce. This strategy makes it possible to eliminate duplicate data maintenance, manual processes and costly interfaces while increasing information accuracy and efficiency. Download this document to read this white paper in its entirety.