Case Study

Tuality Healthcare

Organization:

Hospital-based, not-for-profit, independent, community-governed healthcare system located in Hillsboro, Oregon.
2 acute care community hospitals in Hillsboro and various medical plazas and outpatient facilities.
Serving a population of about 250,000, Tuality employs approximately 1300 healthcare workers.

The Challenge: Constant Demand, Chaotic System

Pressure and time constraints forced department managers to work with myriad staffing suppliers to quickly fill numerous supplemental shifts, causing confusion and chaos.
In one year alone, Tuality booked a total of 22,221 hours in supplemental shifts.
The process Tuality had in place was time-consuming, extremely paper-intensive and, as with many hospitals, demand to fill shifts was overwhelming.
To fill these shifts, Tuality worked with approximately 40 staffing suppliers—each of which required numerous faxes, emails and follow-up calls as part of the process for booking candidates.
Tuality’s accounting and billing processes were completely manual and department managers tabulated invoices by department. This disjointed process made it difficult to get a snapshot of staffing expenditures by pay period and month.
The ultimate goal was to replace the disorganized, paper-intensive staffing process with a streamlined, automated solution. In response to Tuality, many local staffing suppliers tried to create a solution to fit Tuality’s needs. However, none could offer a system to substantially reduce the reliance on faxing reams of documents.

The ShiftWise Solution:

After carefully weighing numerous options, Tuality Healthcare selected ShiftWise, the only solution that fit Tuality’s exact needs.
Tuality was one of two hospitals that participated as beta sites, designing what Tuality considered to be a near-perfect solution.
ShiftWise is now the nation’s leading provider of online healthcare staffing management services.
300 hospitals in multiple states, 7 hospital associations and hundreds of staffing suppliers use the service to fulfill vendor management and supplemental staffing needs.
The ShiftWise service gives hospitals new control over their staffing processes.
It consolidates staff search, booking, billing and record-keeping into a single, easy-to-use online service.
The user experience for booking supplemental staff with ShiftWise is similar to that of booking a flight with an online travel agency. With the same degree of ease that prospective vacationers now go online and enter their flight criteria and then choose the best option from the returned results, organizations can now easily schedule supplemental healthcare professionals through ShiftWise.
The ShiftWise implementation is remarkably simple, requiring no IT resources. Being web-based, it is up and running within days.
The Web-based ShiftWise solution was quickly embraced by Tuality’s Management Information Systems department and numerous department managers and soon all of Tuality’s supplemental shifts were filled online.
With the ShiftWise system in place at Tuality, employees no longer need to spend hours on the phone, sending faxes and sifting through piles of credential paper work to find and book qualified supplemental staff.
Instead of taking a healthcare professional from the first agency to call in response to a staffing request, Tuality can now review nurses based on detailed credentials and select the nurse that best fits their staffing needs.
With ShiftWise, Tuality can now immediately view this information on a per-shift basis, giving the organization accurate insight into staffing costs.
With ShiftWise’s extensive reporting features, Tuality can quantify time and money spent on supplemental staffing over defined increments of time, by type of staff. For example, managers can drill down and identify how many supplemental RN hours were utilized in specific departments. If they uncover patterns and discover that a lot of money and time is being spent on particular types of staffing in a given department, managers can perform a cost-benefit analysis and determine if a regular hire would be a better solution.

Results:

Not only are Tuality’s department managers thrilled with their new staffing management system because of the hours they are saving, but the ShiftWise implementation has also resulted in tremendous cost savings for the facility. For example, the average billing rate for a nightshift ICU nurse was $72/hour before Tuality began working with ShiftWise.
That rate decreased significantly to an average of $58/hour with the implementation of Shiftwise.
Agencies working with Tuality became immediately aware that their prices would need to be competitive since the hospital would know which staff were available at which prices. As a result, Tuality has saved significant money without sacrificing quality of care.
Staffing inefficiencies that once led department managers to frustration are now eliminated by the enhanced functionality and automation of the ShiftWise online service.

Quotes from the Client:

“Our staffing process was like the I Love Lucy episode where they’re trying to make chocolate covered cherries and the process gets completely out of control because no one could keep up,” said Steve Krautscheid, Employment Coordinator at Tuality. “I would walk into the staffing office and they were overwhelmed because agencies were faxing lengthy profiles of available staff. We would receive the entire profile of each person, managing fax after fax of documentation when we really just wanted someone competent to work the next shift. Shortly thereafter, the agencies would call or page nursing administration staff to verify that we received the profiles and ask if we wanted to book the individual for the shift. Follow-up calls, pages and emails created an absolute nightmare for the staff.”

“ShiftWise drastically simplified the entire supplemental staffing process,” said Steve Krautscheid. “Now we can go into the system to see who has been submitted for an open position. In a matter of seconds, with the click of a button, we can view important documents including the applicant’s resume, credentials, training, credentials, and competency check list. Thanks to ShiftWise, we’ve achieved our goals for streamlining temporary staffing—we no longer have to deal with faxes and now have an easy-to-use system in place that allows us to select the best healthcare worker to fill each shift.”