HARTFORD, Wis. — December 22, 2009 — API Healthcare, the leading provider of human capital management solutions to thehealthcare industry, today announced it has significantly strengthened its human capital management solution suite with the acquisition of Clearview Staffing Software, Inc., a leading technology provider of workforce management solutions to help healthcare staffing agencies recruit, credential, schedule and pay temporary staff.

“The synergy created by adding Clearview’s products to the API Healthcare suite supports our vision of providing an integrated, healthcare-focused solution that addresses the challenges around optimizing workforce utilization,” said J.P. Fingado, president and chief executive officer of API Healthcare. “Hospitals and agencies recognize that there is a great deal of inefficiency and tension inherent in their current relationships. Our combined solutions and technology give us the unique ability to address these issues by maximizing operational efficiencies and streamlining workflows, thereby improving hospital-agency relationships.”

API Healthcare is delivering on its vision to optimize human capital by building a complete suite of solutions focused on making it easier to place healthcare workers in the right place at the right time. Healthcare organizations are able to achieve positive outcomes by managing labor costs while still focusing on patient care.  As Clearview’s applications are integrated with API Healthcare’s applications, both hospital users and staffing agencies will be able to realize additional cost savings and productivity gains.

“By becoming a part of API Healthcare, we are able to join a successful, larger company and have a greater impact on the management of the healthcare workforce,” said David Gorman, president and co-founder of Clearview Staffing Software. “The integration of the API Healthcare and Clearview solutions will enable hospitals and health systems to maximize both internal and external staffing resources. The solutions will also make it easier for agencies and hospitals to work together, resulting in a win/win situation.”

Clearview, based in Dallas, Texas, provides SaaS-based healthcare staffing solutions that allow healthcare staffing agencies to automate the process of recruiting, onboarding, licensing, credentialing, scheduling, managing and paying temporary medical professionals.

API Healthcare headquarters will remain in Hartford, WI and the Dallas office will be a key business center for the corporation.

Learn more about the acquisition.

About API Healthcare

API Healthcare is the leading provider of human capital management solutions to the healthcare industry, including time and attendance, staffing and scheduling, patient classification, payroll, human resource, recruiting and onboarding, business analytics and agency staffing solutions. Founded in 1982, API Healthcare has more than 1,000 installations in North America and Europe. API Healthcare’s Payrollmation® system has been rated by KLAS in the Top 20 Best in KLAS Awards Report (www.KLASresearch.com) as the top time and attendance system for the last eight years (2002-2009). The company’s Web site address is www.apihealthcare.com.

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Press Contacts:
Samantha Ehley
(262) 670-2714
samantha.ehley@apihealthcare.com

Kathleen Bowley
Dodge Communications
(770) 576-2558
kbowley@dodgecommunications.com

I am pleased to announce that Clearview Staffing Software has been acquired by API Healthcare. While this decision was certainly not made lightly, I am confident that we’re doing the right thing for both Clearview and our clients.

John Pencsak (JP) and I have dedicated the last 10 years of our lives to building Clearview. We have seen tremendous year-over-year growth as we’ve expanded our product offerings. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been exploring ways to take the company to the next level.  Entertaining a buyer who could provide a greater financial investment and bring complementary solutions to the client base seemed like the next logical step.  After much due diligence, JP and I have determined that API Healthcare is the right fit.  Like Clearview, API Healthcare is focused solely in the healthcare industry and shares our passion for creating dynamic, creative solutions. This acquisition is a smart move that will allow us to be part of a much larger company that is very financially sound and experiencing significant growth. That will ultimately benefit our clients.

The API Healthcare and Clearview solutions are perfect complements to one another. API Healthcare is dedicated to optimizing human capital for hospitals and healthcare delivery organizations; Clearview provides staffing agencies with the tools they need to recruit, credential, schedule and pay high quality temporary medical professionals. However, many of the workflows between agencies and hospitals are manual, inefficient and error prone because there is not a solution that completely automates those processes, until now. The integration of the Clearview and API Healthcare solutions bridges that automation gap. We have an amazing opportunity to redesign the agency/hospital relationship.

This process re-engineering serves the needs of agencies, hospitals, and healthcare workers – it’s a win/win/win situation. We’re looking forward to changing the way agencies and hospitals work together, and we can’t wait for you to learn more.

There have been some positive articles in the last couple of weeks suggesting that the financial health of hospitals is improving.

Health Leaders Media is reporting that hospitals are not only recovering but showing signs a ‘V’ shaped recovery (one that both declines and recovers quickly).

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Earlier this year the Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) put out a report suggesting that 50% of buyers (hospitals and health systems) in the healthcare staffing industry now manage their agency usage through a VMS or MSP model. In an earlier blog post I discussed this in more detail and showed that more hospitals are choosing a vendor neutral VMS technology solution than they are an agency led MSP model.

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ClearviewTSS is proud to provide our clients with the most relevant and robust content in the healthcare industry. Through periodic assessment, our distinguished clinical review board ensures that healthcare staffing agencies provide the most highly qualified temps to their clients.

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Over the past 3 to 6 months, demand has dropped precipitously due to the economy. Job orders are down significantly for a host of reasons. One is elective surgeries have all but disappeared. In addition, a lot of people don’t have health insurance now because they’ve lost their jobs or their co-pays are extremely high. They’re not going to hospitals.

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Keynote with Senator Tom Daschle: National Healthcare Trends and Issues and Their Impact on the Healthcare Workforce

Being in D.C. for the 2009 Healthcare Staffing Summit, you couldn’t help finding yourself in discussions about healthcare reform and its impact on the healthcare staffing industry. The highlight of the Healthcare Staffing Summit was listening to former Senator, Tom Daschle speak on the topic. Whether you agree with him politically or not, you can’t argue with his knowledge and command over the topic of healthcare, as well as his speaking ability. It was an amazing opportunity to hear him. Read the rest of this entry →

As always, the Healthcare Staffing Summit was a well organized event, containing lots of valuable information and great networking opportunities. Being held in Washington, D.C. it was high energy and felt like an appropriate venue considering the current politics surrounding healthcare reform. Attendance was noticeably down from previous years but not dramatically so. Read the rest of this entry →

ShiftWise, the nation’s leading provider of end-to-end workforce solutions now provides seamless data integration with Clearview Staffing Software, the foremost provider of business management staffing software for healthcare suppliers. Read the rest of this entry →

Last week I spoke at the NACHR Conference in Seattle on the benefits of automating your hospital staffing process. Here are the notes from that talk.

Almost everyone I speak with thinks healthcare is immune to economic downturns. Any of us working in the healthcare staffing industry know otherwise. Like almost every other sector of the economy, healthcare too is suffering from the financial crisis. The down economy has forced hospitals and health systems to tighten their budgets and there are few, if any, signs indicating near term improvement.

Some of the major factors impacting hospital budgets include bad debt, increased costs for providing care, state budget cuts, lower reimbursements and treating an increasing amount of uninsured consumers. These factors have many hospitals across the country cutting their budgets, some hospitals are cutting their budgets by tens of millions of dollars in order to meet their fiscal goals.

One of the main areas at which hospitals are looking to make most of their cuts is in labor costs. Typically accounting for 60-70% of a hospital budget, labor costs can increase dramatically and without warning due to overtime, shift bonuses, on-call and other incentive pay. However, making labor cuts is difficult because hospital workloads have not decreased. On July 6, the American Nurses Association (ANA) published results of a recently completed survey where 70% of the 14,000 plus respondents stated that current hospital staffing is insufficient. The combination of all these factors is creating a nightmare scenario for many hospitals and their employees.

But there is hope. Several solutions exist to help hospitals navigate these negative financial waters. Perhaps the best way for hospitals to better manage their budgets, improve efficiencies and increase the productivity of their staff is by automating their staffing processes.

Today’s Staffing Challenges:
Hospitals constantly face new challenges when it comes to staffing, especially if they have a manual staffing process. Today, many hospitals are dealing with:

• A multi-generational workforce with a wide variance in motivators and objectives in their career, as well as different attitudes in their approach to their daily work routines.
• Increased overtime costs as they deal with staff shortages and hiring freezes, requiring their existing staff to work more and suffer from burn out.
• Tighter budgets due to cost cutting measures, lower census and reimbursements, caring for uninsured patients, state budget cuts and higher costs related to patient care.
• Unpredictable variances in staffing levels and patient acuity.
• Ineffective ways of properly utilizing temporary healthcare staff. Many hospitals still view working with healthcare staffing suppliers as a last minute, necessary evil instead of approaching it as a partnership that can produce many benefits. Partnering with the right healthcare staffing suppliers and implementing an effective healthcare vendor management strategy can ensure you are adequately staffed and save you money.
• Compliance. Compliance. Compliance. Compliance – has and always will be a daunting task for hospitals to keep up with. Doing so adequately can be time consuming and costly.

Meet the challenge:
The best way to meet these challenges is to automate your staffing process and implement software applications that will make your life much easier. By automating your staffing process you can face and overcome all of these challenges while increasing the productivity of your existing staff. Effective staffing automation tools can help you:

• Create a flexible, open scheduling environment that affords your staff more freedom when it comes to their schedule. This helps improve morale and cut down on the amount of time it takes to create multiple staff schedules.
• Match your most qualified, cost effective caregiver to every assignment. Automation tools enable you to ensure your staff are properly credentialed for each assignment. In addition, they help you review pay differentials and identify any outliers, such as employees making disproportionally more by working extra shifts or too much overtime, as well as bonuses offerings that may be outdated.
• Eliminate unnecessary overtime and rationalize it when it’s cost effective. For example, there are times when it may make sense to approve overtime in clinical areas that typically generate revenue for your hospital by keeping beds filled. Additionally, automation tools enable you to easily build rules that will alert you when a scheduling decision would put someone into overtime or even disallow it without authorized pre-approval.
• Meet your safe staffing goals by ensuring adequate staffing levels and better staff to patient ratios by quickly reviewing reports or dashboard data summaries.
• Successfully manage multiple staff pools as easy as managing one. Automation tools give you a complete view into all available core and contingent staff. Such oversight helps ensure your internal resource pool staff is put to its highest and best use – supporting areas of high demand rather than filling routine shifts that core staff can work. In addition, creating an effective strategy for using healthcare agency staff ensures you get the best return on investment for all of your staffing decisions.
• Receive real time data, alerts and visual triggers to assist you in your fast pace daily routines. Being alerted instantly for overtime, cancellations or approvals can save you money by enabling you to quickly take action or avoiding mistakes.
• Achieve budgetary goals. Automation allows you to track expenses. By tracking things like pay codes, you might find that scheduling additional staff, even temporary staff, can actually save you money over putting multiple people on call or pushing core staff into overtime.
• Guarantee compliance. Automation tools help reduce the human error factor inherent in a manual process. People get busy and when they do they tend to get sloppy. Reading through piles of paper and faxes, and combing through spreadsheets for hours will inevitably produce errors. Staffing rules that disallow scheduling for lack of proper documentation, active credentials, scheduling conflicts and overtime can easily be created to ensure you stay compliant.
• Better understand your staffing needs and staffing levels. Your staffing data will help you recognize your total staffing needs and enable you to staff strategically instead of reactively.
• Measure employee performance and identify areas that need improvement as well as those that are working.
• Integrate data sources for seamless work flows. If you can’t track it – you can’t manage it. Most applications now have API’s that will allow you to import/export data to/from other systems. The more your data is integrated the easier it is to track and improve your processes.

Conclusion
Most hospitals today are facing similar situations and have the same goals. With the state of the current economy it’s difficult to cover your costs and manage your workloads. It makes sense to look at your labor costs first. However, making labor cuts without first attempting to optimize the productivity of your current workforce could end up being unnecessary and much more costly in the long run. The demand for healthcare professionals will return and cutting staff without proper analysis could hurt you in more ways than one. By automating your staffing process you will see an instant return on investment that will continue paying off long after this economic crisis is over.

This article is brought to you by Staffing Robot, a premier source of intelligence for the healthcare staffing industry.