Leveraging Healthcare Analytics Solutions to Manage and Predict COVID-19 Staffing and Capacity Demands
The challenge of providing quality patient care while maintaining costs is nothing new for healthcare. In the past six months, as the world has gone from a few isolated incidences of COVID-19 in China to a global pandemic with over 13 million cases and almost 573,000 deaths worldwide related to the virus, concerns over productivity and doing more with less has gone from something leadership tries to deal with as best as they can to an issue of epic proportions. Daily, hour by hour, and at times, minute by minute, staffing needs can change significantly as hospitals try to accommodate sudden increases in census and fluctuating patient acuity levels. Several infected patients can completely alter a department’s staffing plan. How do you know which units need help? How can you know where to find that help?
In addition to ensuring adequate staffing levels, leadership must still consider the financial impact of their decisions. Balancing labor costs without sacrificing care quality has always been a priority. However, as facilities struggle to resume elective surgical and diagnostic procedures - often their biggest source of income - and anticipate an influx of patients to the areas that are the most expensive to run such as the ED and ICU’s, maintaining that bottom line will be more important than ever.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated healthcare leadership’s task of managing an ever-changing patient care landscape where staffing decisions that utilize increasingly limited resources most effectively, both in the moment and for the near future, are needed. To do this, they require tools that provide real-time data, anytime, anywhere so immediate changes based on actual or anticipated demand can be made and communicated by unit and facility-wide.
How Can Kronos Help?
Kronos offers several Healthcare Analytics solutions for our Workforce Dimensions™ and Workforce Central® platforms. These comprehensive business intelligence solutions pull data from the many disparate sources within your institution and organize it in a format that is easy to access, understand and act upon. This tool can be thought of as a central repository where you can access the information needed to make fact-based decisions that ensure available resources are being utilized in the most efficient and effective way possible.
Kronos Healthcare Analytics solutions provide information on cost, productivity, overtime usage, scheduling and absence that help you uncover issues and analyze how to best address them. Which units are asking staff to stay extra? Could a less busy unit spare anyone? Not only would this be more cost-effective, but would also increase staff satisfaction. Rather than overworking certain resources, staff who might otherwise be unwillingly sent home can be utilized instead.
Typically, traditional productivity reports just allow for simple trending, often from a historical perspective only. Kronos Healthcare Analytics reports can give you real-time visibility of integrated workforce data so you can monitor performance, identify problems and course correct anytime, anywhere.
Both platforms provide a comprehensive summary of your organization’s productivity and labor statistics, giving you a heads-up display of the critical data needed for effective and timely decision making. On-demand visibility is provided on Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) such as overtime, absence, scheduling, productivity and timeliness in easy-to-read graphs and charts and reports that are color-coded to highlight problem areas with one glance.
Keeping Track of all Your Staff
To say that healthcare organizations have gotten creative with staffing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic would be an understatement. Some units were completely closed while others are overflowing with patients. Staff from ancillary units such as Surgical Services, Diagnostics and Outpatient Clinics were being floated to inpatient floors. Clinicians with administrative roles are taking care of patients. Use of agency and travel nurses is on the rise, not to mention the influx of healthcare providers coming out of retirement and leaving corporate positions to lend a hand in some of the hardest hit areas of the country. Moving forward, how do you keep track of everyone?
There is no shortage of valuable workforce data being collected in countless systems across your organization. You need a way to make sense of it all, figure out what is relevant and then use the information to make timely and informed decisions. You need more than just data. You need insight you can act on. Right now. Kronos Healthcare Analytics solutions can provide you and your leadership team visibility of current metrics they can use to determine needs and make necessary adjustments to ensure resources are deployed appropriately at the unit level up through the entire organization. As this pandemic continues across the country, visibility into workforce productivity and costs will be a crucial component of all organizations’ business continuity plan moving forward.
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