Staffing solutions save time, money
When Steve Krautscheid, employment coordinator at Tuality Healthcare, needs to fill a vacancy in the two-hospital network just outside of Portland, Ore., he goes online and fills out a request form.
That takes all of 30 seconds.
Gone are the days when Krautscheid had to sift through reams of paperwork to find a nurse or healthcare worker qualified enough to fill a specific position. Now he makes use of Shiftwise Automated Staff Management, a service based in nearby Lake Oswego, Ore. After receiving an online request form, Shiftwise culls from its database of staffing agencies and individual applications a list of qualified healthcare workers to fill the vacancy.
“It’s pretty chaotic for hospitals these days,” says Jason Lander, Shiftwise’s founder and board member. “Hospitals have to automate.”
More hospitals and healthcare agencies are using vendors like Shiftwise to fill short-term staffing needs. Faced with a shortage of qualified nurses in an increasingly IT-dependent age, they rely on the services of a new breed of companies that develop online programs to classify and fill the gaps that crop up on a daily basis.
Shiftwise was launched in 2002 in four hospitals, spread to 160 hospitals the following year and is expected to be used in 320 hospitals by the end of this year. Aside from cutting down on paperwork, Lander says the service saves hospitals from $500,000 to $3 million as a result of better and quicker staffing and improved billing.
Krautscheid says he averages about 20 vacancies a day in a system that employs 1,375 people. Tuality has used Shiftwise since 2004, he says, and saves as much as $1 million a year in staffing and billing costs. In addition, the service enables him to analyze how and where replacement staff are used to the best advantage.
According to a study by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 85 percent of all hospital CEOs in the nation have experienced a nursing shortage, while 49 percent admit to having difficulty recruiting nurses. By 2014, the study says, the country will need 1.2 million new nurses, or approximately two out of every five new jobs in healthcare.
Hospitals unable to fill staffing shortages face a variety of concerns. They could divert, or “turf out,” incoming patients to other hospitals, a move that not only deprives them of revenue but also can be a public relations nightmare. They could increase the patient-to-nurse ratio, which places a burden on existing staff and opens the door to medical errors. Some states, like California, have instituted mandated ratios.
Lander says Shiftwise makes sure the workforce it offers is qualified. “It’s very much a restrictive credentialing process,” he says.
Bruce Cerullo, who launched the Lucida Staffing Agency this year in Reading, Mass., says hospitals not only deal with nursing shortages, but have difficulty finding people with the right IT training to fill specific positions. As a hospital’s dependence on IT grows, he says, its IT staff grows as well.
“The IT department used to report to someone who reported to management,” he says. “Now they are right up there with the management team.”
Lucida works with hospitals and healthcare agencies as well as skilled professionals looking for employment. Cerullo and Eric Egnet, Lucida’s CIO and vice president of healthcare information and clinical informatics, say hospitals are resorting to training their own employees to fill multiple roles to avoid using costly IT consultants. Nurses, meanwhile, are taking their newfound IT training and finding better-paying jobs as traveling “clinical informatics specialists.”
Krautscheid says Tuality uses traveling nurses when it can because they’ll be on site for an extended length of time – for example, 13 weeks – but in filling short-term staffing needs, a service like Shiftwise enables him to find someone quickly and easily.
“At the end of the day, you’re talking about people who are taking care of patients,” says Lander. “Anything that helps ... is good.”
