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.

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).

“There has been an improvement at the hospital level that has allowed them [hospitals] to ease up on the cost containments,” he says. “To the extent that they can, hospitals do not want to get caught not operating at appropriate levels in terms of staffing because that is going to hurt them in the long run. Job growth may not come back to historical levels, but over the next 12 months it will definitely be up from what we have seen through much of this year.”

Of course, the only thing to be leery of when predicting ‘V’ shaped recoveries is that the prediction is too early and in fact, what we’re seeing is a ‘W’ (an economy that declines, recovers and declines again). There are several predictions being thrown around in regard to the healthcare staffing industry and the 2010 economic outlook.

Hopefully this won’t be the case. Reading about specific regions, such as Texas, also seeing signs of hospital recovery is also good news.

The percentage of hospital revenue left over after regular business expenses increased from zero in the third quarter of 2008 to 4 percent in the second quarter this year. In Texas, the proportion increased from 6 percent to 8 percent.

via www.dallasnews.com

Only time will tell. But let’s hope for the best.

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

The following new tests have been released.

Clinical Support Tech:
Certified Medication Aide
EMT
Orthopedic Tech
Paramedic

Laboratory:
Cytologist

Nursing Cores:
Emergency Room Medication
Psychiatric Medication
Respiratory Therapy for Nurses (includes reading material)
Ventilator for Nurses (includes reading material)

Pharmacy:
Pharmacy Tech – Retail

The following new skills checklists have been released.

Clinical Support Tech:
Certified Medication Aid
Emergency Room Tech (new version)
Orthopedic Tech
Paramedic

Laboratory
Cytologist

Pharmacy:
Pharmacy Tech – Retail

Note: To use a new Skills Checklist, set the display to Yes from the Skills tab of RSS.

The following tests have been updated.

Clinical Support Tech:
Cardiac Cath Lab Tech
Certified Medical Assistant
Emergency Room Tech

Cores:
Pain Management (updated reading material and Competency Test)

Imaging and Diagnostics:
Cardio-Vascular Intervention

Nursing Cores:
Vascular Access Device Management (updated reading material and Competency Test)

Nursing Specialty:
Cardiac Cath Lab

Pharmacy:
Pharmacy Tech – Hospital (name change)

Note: As always, for any updated Competency Tests currently assigned, the Candidate will automatically receive the new version of the test when they log in to RSS.

The following skills checklists have been updated.

Clinical Support Tech:
Emergency Room Tech is now EMT

Pharmacy:
Pharmacy Tech is now Pharmacy Tech – Hospital

For a complete list of Nationally Validated Skills Checklists and Competency Tests please visit www.clearviewrss.com

The topics for the show covered the spectrum including: healthcare staffing industry data, the economy, selling in the current economy, working with the government, selling IT staffing to hospitals, healthcare vendor management, Locum Tenens and several others. Personally, I always feel that the events and topics on the first day are much better than those on the second day. The second day typically consists of employees from staffing companies sitting on panels and discussing a particular topic related to the industry. However, I always find a lot of these discussions to be stating the obvious and don’t feel there is anything of major value ever being revealed. Fortunately, the sessions from the first day always make the whole event worth it.

I was most happy with and surprised by the discussions on healthcare reform and how it could affect the healthcare staffing industry. Having Tom Daschle there to present this topic was by far the highlight of the event for me.

In addition, the economic news and industry data was of course really depressing but also a sharp dose of reality. And, as always, it was interesting to hear VMS being referred to as a “threat to the industry” by the SIA, even though VMS has now been adopted by 48% of hospitals in the market.

Next week I’ll have several posts containing notes from a few of the sessions I attended. If you weren’t able to attend, hopefully these summaries will provide you with some good information.

The only major complaint I have with the Healthcare Staffing Summit is the cost. As a vendor, it costs us 3-5x as much to set up a booth as it does to attend any other industry conference we go to. (I won’t even mention the fact that I don’t agree with VMS companies being listed as vendors and not participants) Although it is a really great conference, I’m not sure how these high fees can continue to be justified. I heard this same feedback from several of the attendees and hope that the SIA will reconsider their fees before next years show.

All in all it was a great conference. If you didn’t attend, you certainly missed out.

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

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.

Here are my top 10 reasons for effectively using temporary healthcare staff at your hospital:

1. It doesn’t have to be time consuming. There are several ways to automate the management of staff from healthcare suppliers. Everything from job requisitions, credential management, timekeeping, invoicing and reporting can now be automated. The methods for doing so can be as simple as better using email and expanding existing staffing or timekeeping systems to partnering with a staffing supplier that offers Managed Services or a healthcare VMS company.

2. Last minute needs. Your census changes daily, sometime hourly. If a major fluctuation occurs you can’t hire to your census. Having contracts with valued staffing suppliers that can assist you in these times can ensure you are properly staffed when you are in need.

3. Increase your hospitals revenue. Unmet staffing levels can lead to turfing patients, which can lead to unfilled beds. Unfilled beds can lead to a lack of revenue for your hospital. Therefore, ensuring proper staffing levels or even increasing your staffing levels in order to take care of more patients can help your hospitals bottom line.

4. It’s not always more expensive. Lets face it. Employees are expensive. Depending on what metrics you are using – employers can spend up to an extra 35 – 50% on top of an employees salary for benefits and other overhead costs, not to mention costs associated with attrition. So, with that, consider the typical markup of a healthcare staffing supplier (35 – 50%). Remember, the client only pays for time worked and orientation costs (in some cases). There are no associated recruitment, hiring or attrition costs. Therefore, using temporary staff in a well planned and managed way can actually end up saving you quite a bit of money. Lisa Amorao from ATR has a post specifically on this topic in her company’s staffing blog.

5. Maintaining steady usage ensures you have staff when you need it. If you infrequently contact your staffing suppliers they will place you in a lower priority. However, if you maintain a steady relationship with them you ensure they can meet your needs when you most need it. Further, if you’re a hospital that has an in-depth orientation process it’s a good idea to keep orientation slots open and candidates moving through them so that when you do request temporary healthcare professionals you have a pool of staff ready to go in your area – not sitting through orientation.

6. Use more travelers (contract staff). Hospitals that primarily use travelers have more control over their staffing needs. Working with travelers requires more planning and preparation but can help you fill in anticipated staffing gaps due to seasonality and other occurrences. The bill rates for travelers are typically lower due to a longer guarantee of work or from differences in economic factors in different parts of the country. In addition, using travelers allows you to work with individuals who will be at your facility longer and therefore have a greater understanding of your practices and become more efficient in their patient care delivery. Finally, if you find the traveler is someone you would consider hiring – do that. Work with the staffing company to offer the caregiver a new job.

7. Avoid costly overtime pay. The amount your hospital spends on overtime can end up being much more expensive than using temporary staff. I’ve worked with several hospitals that were attempting to reduce their spending on staffing by cutting back on outside staff. However, because these hospitals were inappropriately managing their overtime hours they ended up spending more money than before.

8. Avoid staff burnout. There is a lot of talk about nursing burnout these days. Hospitals have cut back on healthcare supplier usage, however, there is still a nursing shortage. Therefore, in a lot of cases, that means hospitals are asking their staff to work harder. Doing so can be an effective solution in the short term. However, eventually your employees will start suffering from burn out and need reprieve.

9. Starting new projects. Implementing an EMR system? Opening new units? If so, most likely you will become quickly understaffed as your internal staff are dedicated to these new initiatives. Planning ahead of time to cover these projects by partnering with good staffing suppliers will ensure adequate coverage.

10. Insert your reason here. I’m leaving number 10 open for others to provide. Feel free to chime in.

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