Optimizing Usage of Workforce Scheduler Extensions — Leveraging Reports
There are several reports within Workforce Scheduler Extensions. Determining which ones are the most important for a facility is an important step in leveraging the solution to full capacity and meeting your business goals. Reviewing all the reports is beyond the scope of this blog post, but I’ll discuss a few of them. Before I do, let’s talk about the use of reports in general.
About Reporting
I often work with clients who have a strong desire to utilize reports, but they don’t have any standards around who is responsible to run reports, how often to run them, the purpose for running the reports, or the departments or individuals the information is reported out to. These are questions that the leadership or project team should be asking. If you can formalize this, that’s even better. Unit managers who know they are responsible to run the Unit Profile report biweekly and bring it to their one-to-one with their supervisor have a concrete goal that can be measured or tracked. Of course, it’s also important that your information in the system is up to date and accurate. See part 2 of this series, about reviewing your configuration, for tips on what items to focus on. As the saying goes, “good data in, good data out.”
If you’re currently working on a Workforce Scheduler Extensions project, your project manager or solution consultant can provide additional information about reports — or even provide a presentation on reports. It’s also possible to engage one of the solution consultants for a consultation around reports if you’d like. But in the meantime, let’s talk about a few specific reports.
Staff Assignment Report
Probably the single most used report is the Staff Assignment report.
Charge nurses typically print this report before each shift because it shows the patient assignments. One thing to think about for this report is the use of tasks and tags. Both items can print on the report and can appear with specific staff or a specific patient. If it’s important that a unit has phone extensions associated with specific staff, you can configure tasks to achieve that goal. Perhaps it’s important for the charge nurse to know whether a staff member can speak a specific language. You could develop a staff tag for that purpose. These things can help with the day-to-day operation of a nursing unit and make the process easier and/or more efficient.
There is an alternative to this report called the Patient Assignment report. It is organized differently and doesn’t allow for tasks or tags to be printed on it, but some units prefer it over the Staff Assignment report.
Unit Profile Report
If there is one report I almost always recommend for a unit manager, it’s the Unit Profile report. The Unit Profile report contains many different pieces of information but puts them all in one single report.
Some highlights of this report:
- It answers the following questions:
- What is the workload distribution for my unit?
- What detailed census information do I have for my unit?
- How am I doing with the budget for my unit? Am I spending too much?
- You might want to use it because it:
- Allows for the bimonthly review of workload distribution
- Lets you monitor unclassified patients and how they relate to the accuracy of the workload distribution
- Provides a shift-by-shift overview of workload utilization
- Shows how often units are classifying and assigning all patients, and whether there is workload skewing between shifts
- Is an excellent monitoring tool for shift compliance
- Has a Quality Event Details subsection that shows how often specific events occurred as well as the census level, the licensed-staff-to-patient ratio, and who was assigned at the time of the event
Utilization Dashboard
This is an excellent report for facility folks who are charged with tracking compliance. It gives a big-picture view of multiple units and looks at things like patient classification compliance and licensed assignment compliance. This is also a great report to run and then send out to unit managers on a scheduled basis to keep everyone focused on the end goal of 100% system usage.
Licensed Coverage
If your facility, state, or other regulatory body requires you to report on meeting-specific, licensed-staff to-patient ratios, this report is for you. It requires that ratio targets are configured in your system and can quickly and easily report whether a unit is compliant with meeting those targets.
These are just a few of the reports available within the Workforce Scheduler Extensions system.
For more information on reports, check out the post Getting the Most out of Workforce Scheduler Extensions Reports from my colleague Meg Schramm.
If you would like to engage a solution consultant to assist with your reporting needs, contact Global Support or your sales representative.
Up next
In the next post, we’ll bring all the topics in this series together. Check in at the Working Smarter Café to make sure you don’t miss it, or click Subscribe via email under my bio in the top right-hand corner to subscribe to Working Smarter Café and get emails when new content is published.
Other blogs in this series: