It’s not exactly earth-shattering that when a health facility adds more staff to care for a patient, the quality of that care goes up. There are a number of studies that make this very claim.
One such report was released in late 2013 claiming that readmission rates shrink when more nurses are added.
It’s compelling data, especially when you consider that the report found:
Hospitals with higher nurse staffing levels have 41% lower odds of receiving the maximum penalty for readmissions, compared with hospitals with lower staffing.
From the standpoint of care provided (taking costs out entirely), of course this makes sense. Get patients the level of care that produces optimal results and you probably won’t see that patient again. But the reality is that every decision must be weighed with costs in mind.
So how does a hospital marry the altruistic desire to provide the best possible care with the reality of doing so within the confines of a budget?
We could simply focus on the cost of penalties associated with a poor care experience, but that is well known. What’s less obvious is the inefficiency often found in contingent staffing programs that are critical to maintaining staffing levels. This is often a program of waste that focuses on applying bandages to scheduling wounds. It’s a triage effort that costs more than it should.
3 ways to cost-effectively meet quality standards
- Run an efficient float pool. We frequently see six figure cost reductions when hospitals build out their float pool to better manage temporary labor. But there’s a big “CAUTION!” flag to wave here. Just having a float pool doesn’t mean it’s actually efficient. Some of them are, quite frankly, a mess. Without proper data reporting and schedule management, it’s too easy to put the wrong people in the wrong place or even miss a shift altogether.
- Agency analysis. Are you getting the best performance for the optimal rate from agency resources? When you automate, a world of previously unknown data opens itself up to you. This allows you to see clear as day that Bleh Staffing Agency is wasting your time and money while TotallyAwesome Nurse Suppliers is delivering everything you hoped for. As long as you have the data, you can confidently give more of your business to the latter and reap the benefits.
- Visibility improvements. The time savings can be astounding when you can see more clearly what’s truly going on. We analyzed a single hospital in southern CA and found an improvement of nearly 100 hours/month in the time it took to perform contingent staffing related tasks when they automated. Move that out across an entire health system’s network and, well, you know what they say… time is money.