With the introduction of value-based healthcare a decade ago came a drumbeat now familiar to any CNO, house supervisor or float pool manager: Maximize labor efficiencies. In simple terms, that means precisely hitting your staffing targets to deliver safe, high-quality patient care without incurring labor cost overruns.
But, as you know, that’s a tricky proposition, especially when you’re trying to hit optimal staffing targets across the entire enterprise. Your margin for error can be razor thin. Overschedule by just one CNA and find a unit flagged for being “under-productive.” Consistently under-schedule by one nurse on a unit and find yourself fielding complaints of burnout from the other nurses due to the department’s ongoing over-productivity issues.
If you feel you can’t win when it comes to staffing efficiency, you’ll be delighted to learn about a new tool that allows you to achieve optimal staffing on every unit, every day, across the enterprise. It’s as simple as drag-and-drop.
Introducing the Enterprise Resource Management Dashboard
Designed mainly for use by house supervisors and float pool managers, ShiftWizard’s new Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) dashboard provides all the information you need to maximize staffing efficiencies in every department. At a glance you can see which units are over- or under-productive and adjust staffing with just a click of the mouse.
The ERM dashboard, being introduced soon, uses color coding and easy-to-read tags to inform you at a glance which departments are short-staffed, and which could safely send a person home (or transfer them to a different unit, or assign them to the float pool – whatever your facility policy requires). If you need to shuffle a few staff people to maximize staffing efficiency, you simply review the list of staff working that day, click on anyone’s name and drag that tile to the department you wish to assign her to. Done!
As an added bonus, ShiftWizard’s ERM dashboard won’t allow you to assign a person to a department they’re not qualified to work in. Let’s say you want to float a nurse from the ortho floor over to L&D. If the nurse you want to transfer doesn’t hold the right certifications to work in L&D, then the system will block your ability to move that staff person to that department. No more time wasted combing through files or playing telephone tag to figure out which nurses are qualified to float to various units.
Detailed Data Tracking to Make Informed Staffing Decisions
The ERM dashboard allows you to adjust staffing on-the-fly, but it also provides you with detailed analyses of staffing across the enterprise so you can justify an overall increase or decrease in scheduling. For example, if you review the productivity statistics for an entire quarter, ShiftWizard presents you with a bar graph that allows you to quickly identify departments that are consistently over-productive. Using that data, you can confidently approach the finance department to request an additional FTE for that unit.
And you also can leave notes in the system explaining why a particular department became over-productive on a particular day. Perhaps a patient coded, and you transferred additional staff to a unit to deliver patient care while the regular staff were engaged in saving a life. That’s a pretty good justification for over-productivity, but it’s also an explanation that can quickly be lost to time if not written down. ShiftWizard preserves this information to refresh your memory as you review staffing by the month or quarter.
Save Time and Reduce Stress with the ERM Dashboard
As a house supervisor, float pool manager or CNO, you juggle dozens of competing priorities every day. We get that – because we’re nurses, too. We know how stressful it can be to achieve labor efficiencies because we’ve lived through it ourselves.
Call us today for a complimentary demo of ShiftWizard – scheduling software designed by nurses for nurses – and discover how it can help you enjoy your job again (and keep management happy with labor efficiencies, too).
