OWM for Healthcare
Delivering outstanding quality and cost effective patient care by optimizing workforce
management
Healthcare is a high-pressure industry facing demands of higher-quality patient care, cost
controls, regulatory compliance, and increasing competition. Other challenges include high
turnover, skills shortages (e.g. nursing crisis) and readiness for epidemics like bird-flu,
SARS and other disasters.
While standards rise, workforce expense still occupies the largest share in operational
cost. As per the American Hospital Association (AHA), nearly 60% of U.S. hospitals' operating
costs are related to caregiver’s salaries and benefits.
This is further aggravated by shortage of healthcare workers in major developed countries.
US hospitals need over 200,000 nurses than they currently employ, and this shortage is expected
to increase to 800,000 nurses by 2020.
This creates a daily nightmare for hospital administrators as they work to staff their hospitals
with increasing reliance on agencies and overtime, and aim to optimize staff utilization as
well as retention. ‘Magnet Hospitals’ that successfully attract and retain highly
qualified and motivated nursing staff is an initiative to address this issue.
A pressing need to integrate healthcare providers into a state emergency response system
is also posed by pandemics like SARS in 2003, Asian Tsunami 2004, acts of international terrorism,
and recently fears of outbreak of bird-flu.
Whilst healthcare providers aim to deliver highest quality of care, these challenges continually
push them in directions requiring a fine balancing act— achieving patient care excellence,
bottom-line objectives, and employee satisfaction in tandem.
OWM for Healthcare meets these challenges head on. An industry-focused
suite of workforce optimization solutions, OWM targets the key challenges
faced by healthcare organizations.
Features and Functionalities
OWM Self Service Component
A central entry point for employees, this web based self service component tracks shift requests,
claims, skills, leaves, etc. It empowers care givers to participate in scheduling through a unique
shift bidding system, propagating fairness and work-life balance. Easily accessible from anywhere,
staff can view their work schedules online, state preferences, swap, change or call off shifts,
etc.
OWM Scheduling Module
Hospital staff scheduling is known to be complex and time consuming (especially Clinicians
and Nurses in OT, ICU and Accident & Emergency Medicine), requiring satisfaction of multiple
and often competing objectives (e.g. highest quality of service, fairness,
minimized cost, maximizing utilization, minimizing fatigue, etc.), and conflicting
requirements (e.g. staff preferences, acuity needs, contractual requirements,
staff ratios, regulatory compliance etc). OWM transforms this overwhelming
task into a synchronized and well-managed process. Powered by FriarTuck’s state-of-the-art
optimization engine,
it uses breakthrough mathematical techniques to generate optimal shift schedules
quickly and easily without any hassles, and automates the entire process of
planning, scheduling, deployment, tracking, reporting and claims processing.
OWM Labor Forecasting Module
OWM makes demand driven workforce management possible by taking into account staffing needs
and workloads fine grained to designations, skill-mix, experience, even language
proficiency for each day in the planning cycle, by shift type and/or block
of hours. It replaces conventional methods of nurse-bed or nurse-patient ratios
with a more scientific approach to estimating and measuring demand, linked
to patient acuity. OWM processes acuity information into a meaningful guide
for aligning staffing levels to patient care needs. This helps minimize unnecessary
under/over coverage and maintain consistent quality care. Planning typically
uses statistical techniques along with data mining to analyze past planning,
scheduling and deployment decisions.
OWM Executive Component
This fulfils executive management’s need for high-level real-time information using simple
intuitive interfaces. Powerful visual indicators and dashboard views allow
executives to quickly assess key performance indicators (KPIs) to make informed
decisions. A focus area for OWM is the staff performance at enterprise level.
Daily, weekly and monthly trends provide the information necessary to take
operational, tactical and strategic decisions. The module is easily extensible
to support mobility devices like PDAs, smart phones and integrates with business
intelligence tools for extensive analytics, reporting and slicing & dicing
of information into meaningful metrics.
OWM Emergency Response System
Emergencies with human casualties require mobilization of large numbers of medical staff within
an extremely short period of time. ERS handles all workforce-related matters
that arise with the handling of emergencies. ERS guides the entire mobilization
process for reacting to an emergency situation, starting from the identification of relevant
nurse and doctor categories to handle the emergency, through to scheduling suitable staff for
actual deployment and tracking of the staff in a designated emergency response department. The
ability to rapidly deploy new departments for emergency response was unthinkable before staff
skills, demands and preferences were captured in real-time in optimizing staff scheduling systems.
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