For a CEO, CNO or nurse manager, delivering quality patient care in today’s business environment can feel like it’s less about the “care” and more about the budget. It can be tricky to balance the financials with the goal of delivering superior patient care, but the right tools can make this juggling act more manageable.
In fact, your staff scheduling software can help you solve these problems when you integrate it with your EMR. ShiftWizard can make it easy to accomplish both your patient care goals and your business goals.
Control costs by forgetting the midnight census
Nursing costs represent one of the biggest budget factors you can control, but staffing appropriately based on a midnight census can challenge even the savviest nurse manager since the midnight census rarely reflects the reality of what’s to come later. If you guess wrong and schedule too many nurses, then you’re paying for people who don’t need to be there. If you don’t bring in enough staff, your patient satisfaction scores (and reimbursements) might sink.
Integrating ShiftWizard staff scheduling software with your EMR provides a superior alternative to using the midnight census. ShiftWizard pulls real-time census data every hour and aggregates the information to provide you with a true daily average census. Then, ShiftWizard matches up the census figures to the staffing matrix so you can schedule your real allowed staffing numbers for the upcoming shift.
When you precisely manage your staffing targets, you can deliver great patient care and hit your budget numbers at the same time.
Reduce reliance on costly agency nurses
Staffing your unit based on ShiftWizard’s true average census elevates your patient care and can save you money, but what if your patient load soars unexpectedly anyway? Should you get on the phone with the agency to have some nurses sent over STAT?
Using agency nurses is a high-cost option that can be avoided using ShiftWizard.
When you integrate ShiftWizard with your EMR, you get enterprise-wide staffing transparency. A nurse manager on an understaffed floor can instantly view which departments are currently overstaffed and click a button to request additional nurses from those areas. Sharing staff across units confers many benefits beyond the cost savings over hiring an agency nurse. Your own nurses understand how your organization operates, from where to find supplies to how to contact the pharmacist for a specialty med. These nurses can work more efficiently and provide higher quality care than an agency nurse who may be unfamiliar with the setting and protocols for your specific unit.
Increase productivity across the board
By integrating ShiftWizard with your EMR, you get concrete data related to productivity in terms of hours per patient day, visit or procedure. This data allows you to fine-tune your staffing to ensure you meet both your clinical goals and your business goals. You might see patient satisfaction scores soar when you’re able to reduce waiting time for imaging studies, for example, and you’ll avoid overstaffing when it’s not called for – which keeps the budget flexible.
You may have thought about ShiftWizard as a nurse scheduling tool that’s superior to spreadsheets, but integrating it with your EMR gives you the power to do much more than scheduling. This sophisticated software that’s easy to use can help you staff appropriately, reallocate resources with the click of a button to avoid unnecessary labor costs and increase productivity across units.
Read More:
ShiftWizard’s History: Founded by Nurses, For Healthcare
Prediction vs Forecasting: How Knowing the Difference Can Empower CNO Success
