A recent study by Works & Trusted Health of more than 500 frontline nurses found that the key to increasing satisfaction in the nursing field is providing more flexibility in work arrangements, including the nurse’s ability to self-arrange work days and hours.
Twenty-four percent of nurses surveyed said having to organize their lives every four to six weeks caused significant career dissatisfaction and poor mental health.
PROBLEM
Furthermore, from 2020 to 2021, the nursing workforce experienced its largest decline since the 1980s: The total supply of registered nurses fell by more than 100,000. A study published on Medical concluded a significant number of those 100,000 nurses were under 35 years old.
There are many converging trends contributing to clinical resource strain and nurse turnover: aging patient populations, burnout due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and shifting workforce preferences amount of labor.
Over the past few years, workplaces at Mercy, a 50-hospital health system headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, has transformed to represent five generations, each with different work preferences. As a result, today’s colleagues are placing much greater emphasis on work/life balance and flexible compensation.
These preferences are more pronounced among Millennials and Gen Z than among Generation X and Baby Boomers, but the trends are increasingly cross-cutting.
“During the pandemic, Mercy nurses have left for raises, but pay has not been the main driver,” said Betty Jo Rocchio, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Mercy. ”. “Their workload versus how much we pay them is the catalyst. Clinicians can no longer tolerate pre-pandemic working conditions and they want more control over their schedules.” me.
She continued: “The trusted Work & Health study of frontline nurses found that one-third feel a lack of control over the day they work creates a significant barrier to their satisfaction and be sustainable with your career”. “To create a more sustainable workforce and reduce our reliance on external staffing sources, such as travel nurses, Mercy wants to provide more flexible work opportunities for clinicians and improve administrative efficiency while doing so.”
Mercy tried different staffing and incentive models, she added, but was never able to fully optimize staffing, which is why Mercy turned to provider Works & Trusted. Health to help improve its staffing model.
PROPOSE
After meeting with Works, the Mercy team knew the company was the right place to work on a technology platform for the health system, Rocchio said.
“Our overall goal is to make nurses’ lives easier by giving them more flexibility and therefore more control over their weekly schedules,” she said. “We want to increase the efficiency of our workforce, attract and retain quality talent, and reduce unnecessary labor costs. Mercy is a leader in innovation, so we know that changing Changing this mentality will require a bold new vision to redesign the nurse staffing model.
“On the front end, the vendor outlined that Mercy can provide our nurses with scheduling flexibility in a seamless, person-centered application that is easy to use and transparent. Be transparent about the details of the shift – hours, pay, co-workers on the shift, etc.,” she continued. “This app will provide both frontline nurses and clinical staff with an easy way to pick up additional shifts and reduce time spent organizing and managing schedules.”
On the back end, the vendor provided Mercy with data and analytics gathered from the software that gave Mercy greater insight into how to optimize care delivery and clinical labor management .
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
The platform is designed to enable Mercy to capture all levels of the workforce, including the health system’s core nurses, local and regional pop-up groups, and performing nurses.
“Additionally, we wanted to automate how Mercy executes shifts,” Rocchio explains. “We collaborated with the provider to identify nurses on Mercy’s recruiting team, flag open shifts, and assign available shifts to the most suitable nurses based on patient preferences and experience. Surname.
“While there are still open shifts, our core nursing workforce will use the app to accept incentive cases,” she continued. “We share remaining open incentive cases with our gig and per diem workforce. Clinicians simply tap to claim a case and it is automatically logged in Our workforce management and planning system powered by this technology helps reduce costs, increase fill rates, and significantly reduce the amount of time medical managers spend. dozens spent trying to fill shifts.”
After many discussions and collaboration with the Works team, Mercy began the process of modernizing long-term agency labor procurement with two vendor programs: Works Flex and Works OnDemand.
“At every step, open communication and idea sharing are priorities to confirm that we are deeply addressing key concerns in our staffing model and keeping every stakeholder in mind – from frontline nurses to human resources managers, administrators, leaders and of course patients,” Rocchio said.
She continued: “By using Works Flex, a powerful VMS tool, we can streamline burdensome processes, drive workflow automation, and refocus the user experience for clinical recruiting managers, a pillar of the HR process that is often overlooked and overworked. . “We then deployed Works OnDemand to support automated open shift recruiting across our 50-hospital system, allowing us to predict schedule gaps and recruit clinicians accordingly intelligently for each open shift.”
By leveraging the vendor’s artificial intelligence engine and proprietary behavior change pricing algorithm, Mercy can determine which clinicians are interested in which shifts, load balancing shifts Match and recruit selectively to balance occupancy and spend. All of this minimized Mercy’s dependence on external labor sources and minimized the risk of overspending for the staffing agency.
“The AI-powered workforce management platform enables our team to create a more flexible workforce – a combination of core workforce, regional and local float teams, and internal nurse demonstration – which we know increases overall morale and limits the potential for clinician burnout,” Rocchio noted. “We are using AI to determine the right level of incentives to offer to ensure open shifts are filled without overspending.
“Within a year of implementing Mercy Works on Demand, we reduced labor costs, administrative workload and nurse turnover while supporting patient volumes and levels,” she added. safety of nursing staff”.
RESULT
From the beginning, Mercy’s goals were threefold: promote workforce efficiency, attract and retain quality talent, and reduce unnecessary labor costs. Through the use of AI-powered workforce technology, the health system has improved operational efficiency through automation, reduced labor costs with flexible incentive pricing, and Reduce reliance on travel nurses by systematizing talent.
“One way to see how this has played out is to examine our staffing structure: before implementing the technology, our staff was 67% core staff, 8% staff flexible (including local and regional floating groups) and 25% are agency staff,” she explained. “Then the mix becomes 69% core employees, 23% flexible and contract employees, and just 8% agency employees.
“By 2023, by reducing our reliance on travel nurses, we were able to achieve $30.7 million in savings related to reducing high labor spending rates,” she continued. grant”. “These savings are made possible through the availability of a flexible alternative workforce, float pools and contract workers, who become easier to find through the platform.”
In addition to savings, the technology platform also helps reduce time spent on HR and work planning by 20%, increase the organization’s occupancy rate from 83% to 86%, and reduce turnover by 8%, including down 9% in first-year revenue, she added.
“All of this signals to us that we are not only driving savings, but are also providing invaluable flexibility to our employees, helping them feel more fulfilled in their careers and sustain their careers,” she said. maintain yourself through your profession”.
ADVICE TO OTHERS
Rocchio advises that Mercy’s ability to maximize flexibility, offer more options to employees, scale its technology, and meet its monetary goals is due in part to its commitment to monitoring incoming data. This and these results every day.
“We continually make adjustments to maintain this level of success, and that’s what I advise any other health system leader to keep in mind: There is no one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. everyone about human resources issues”. “It’s a delicate dance that requires constant analysis and monitoring, beyond the tool you’re using.
“For other healthcare leaders looking to better manage their workforce with an HR platform, automation is a must – especially if you want to scale,” she concludes. scale across multiple hospital locations”. “Every piece of data flows automatically through your system to maintain fairness and transparency in payment for shifts across health systems, resulting in better profits and more flexibility for my staff.”
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