Oakwood Healthcare System

Organization:

• 4 acute care hospitals
  
• Serves over 35 communities in the Detroit area and a total of one million patients
• Recently named one of America's Best Hospitals by U.S. News & World Report

 The Challenge: Too Many Duplicate Staffing Processes

• With several locations and a total of 9,800 employees, staffing issues were an organizational concern
• Oakwood books 30,000 eight-hour shifts per year and 25,000 twelve-hour shifts per year. 
• For years, Oakwood used agency staffing resources as well as its own contingent staffing pool for open nursing shifts.
• The labor-intensive phone- and fax-based system became increasingly complicated.
  
• All four hospitals were using duplicate resources, the same processes were being replicated at each facility to manage internal and external supplemental staffing processes and the redundancy was wasteful and inefficient.
  
• Additionally, there were financial drawbacks as the majority of staff was drawn from agencies, which charged a higher rate for the staff they supplied.
• As a result, money was being spent unnecessarily. Staffing managers wanted to more closely track how staff was being allocated individually by hospital and needed a solution that did not involve increased cost and would unite all facilities’ staffing processes.
  

 The ShiftWise Solution:

• After a review of six variant models, Oakwood chose to partner with ShiftWise. They were particularly impressed by the work put into the development of the IT tool as well as the flexibility the system offered to meet Oakwood’s interests and demands. 
• The ShiftWise service provides hospitals with unprecedented control over their staffing processes by consolidating staff search, booking, time keeping, billing, data collection and record-keeping into a single, easy-to-use online service.
  
• It enables hospitals and agencies to eliminate their manual and paper staffing processes by providing on-line tools to effectively and efficiently manage all of their supplemental staffing needs.
  
• This new efficiency results in increased employee productivity, decreased staffing costs and, ultimately, better quality patient care.
• Adopting ShiftWise is easy for hospitals because it requires no specialized IT resources and no recurring or implementation costs.
• At Oakwood 56 percent of the shifts are filled internally, while 44 percent of the open shifts are booked externally.

 Results

• Cost Savings, Consolidated Staffing and Improved Communication
• By providing internal nurses with the ability to book shifts online before turning to staffing agencies, Oakwood’s agency use has significantly decreased, which saved the organization $1.2 million in 2006 alone.
  
• ShiftWise enabled Oakwood to quickly centralize its internal supplemental staffing contingency pool, they can now track the internal nursing program.
  
• Additionally, external staffing purchases and acquisitions are managed effectively.
  
• For Oakwood, ShiftWise has served as a successful communication tool for ensuring the right coverage is in place for all shifts. The ease of communication between finance, accounts payable, agencies and hospitals gives them the ability to look on a daily basis at utilization and expenses.

 Quotes from the Client

“With ShiftWise, we knew we could keep our agency suppliers happy and engaged while offering a more reliable process,” said Barbara Medvec, chief nursing officer for Oakwood Healthcare Inc. "Implementation took one month and the service was exceptionally easy for nurses to use. Now, they could even book shifts from their homes."