In-house recruiters may not be working directly with patients, but the decisions they make regarding the workforce have great potential to influence your medical group’s overall performance.
When your organization has sufficient staff to meet workload demands, the clinicians perform better. The organization has higher retention rates leading to greater patient satisfaction, reflecting in your organization’s effectiveness, reputation, and profits. Well-staffed healthcare organizations:
Produce fewer incidences of provider burnout
Operate more efficiently and effectively
Experience better patient outcomes
Increase revenue
Workforce optimization is a crucial strategy that helps your medical departments ensure the workforce’s demands are met while serving the patients’ needs. Let's take a closer look at how workforce optimization can better support your organization.
In the business world, workforce optimization is the practice of reviewing the production, budget, and staffing for all departments within a company. It involves analyzing where the money is being spent, where the most time is being dedicated, and generally determining what areas are most effective while also identifying where there can be improvements.
In the healthcare sector, workforce optimization is a critical component of staffing management that involves examining each department in your medical system. Department heads can use the information from a workforce optimization analysis to assess staffing needs and determine if a particular department is overstaffed or determine where the organization needs to deploy the most staffing resources.
This information is invaluable when it comes to staffing and scheduling. It also helps the departments provide the medical organization with critical budgetary information while managing financial expectations.
Workforce optimization helps encourage an environment of accountability and transparency within the organization enabling your departments to improve quality control, contain staffing costs, create greater profitability by service line, and improve service levels. Giving an honest assessment of its operational needs and where they can be adjusted helps the organization as a whole.
Contingent Staffing
When the medical departments understand their staffing needs, it allows them to explore creative staffing solutions. For example, your organization needs a certain number of staff members at all times. You may also experience surge periods when you’re busier than usual and may require additional staff. Or perhaps you’re experiencing a staffing shortage and need to identify new staff members quickly.
Acquiring precise knowledge and data on staffing needs means that your organization can pursue locum tenen staffing solutions. Partnering with a trusted staffing organization, like VISTA, equips your organization with fully trained, on-call staff who can assist when needed but not necessarily serve as full-time staff members.
Decreased Burnout Among Healthcare Staff
Burnout is a real concern among providers. The high demands of long hours and heavy patient workloads can leave providers feeling overwhelmed. Locum tenens can provide greater flexibility, work-life balance, and the ability to practice patient-focused medicine. When your medical group has a holistic, comprehensive view of their staffing profile, they can adapt the number of staff members brought on and how often they're scheduled. Contingent staffing solutions help avoid overscheduling, which allows providers an opportunity to rest and recharge.
Cost-Effective
Workforce optimization also helps manage clinical staffing costs. By looking at hard data that indicates where the organization's budget is going, and the results the organization is getting from their spending, your departments can adapt as needed. They will be able to improve efficiency, which will positively impact the organization's overall bottom line.
Better Patient Outcomes
Ultimately, every medical group’s primary objective is to obtain the best possible outcome for as many patients as possible. Having your workforce optimized makes it easier for your department heads to manage healthcare organizations' needs and demands. In turn, physicians are better prepared to provide the best quality of care. This is then transferred to the end-user: the patient, who receives the highest quality care from a healthcare workforce that isn't overburdened.
Now that you understand the benefits of workforce optimization in supporting your medical departments, it's crucial to know how to implement it. When you work with VISTA, we conduct a Workforce Optimization Review and give you details and options for implementing your strategy. You gain access to our MSP/VMS technology that enables you to look over analytics and make strategic decisions. Here's how using software can help improve productivity.
It consolidates your healthcare organization’s data. Data is your medical group's most important weapon in the fight against inefficiency. Having a workforce optimization software solution puts that data in one centralized, easy-to-access location.
The right software provider also enables your organization to employ analytics to predict and anticipate staffing needs. You can examine trends and make decisions based on past performance. You can then use that information to develop and execute viable staffing strategies.
Finally, it helps you improve your profit margin. Managing staff and other costs is an essential part of an organization. However, they can't do it reliably without data on budgets, profits and losses, and other financial information.
Workforce optimization empowers your medical departments to understand how and when to employ contingent staffing, banish burnout to keep staff feeling rested and refreshed, and better manage your staffing needs and budget to enable better patient outcomes.
The benefits of workforce optimization are clear, but you'll need to do more than understand its many positives. The smartest approach is to work with a staffing provider who acts as both an expert in the staffing field and a trusted partner with you, providing cultivated expertise every step of the way.
You can trust VISTA. We have a proven track record of working alongside healthcare and medical organizations to guide them through the workforce optimization process. For more information on how VISTA can be a resource to help you save money and achieve workforce optimization, contact us today!