Labor Management

The Labor Management Explorer analytics accelerator provides data and visualizations to support efficient utilization of a health system’s labor force. It allows users to dynamically interact with EMR, timecard, payroll, and HR data from multiple source systems to discover meaningful opportunities to improve productivity, decrease budget variation for labor costs, and increase direct management of labor resources. 

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Labor Management Explorer equips your managers to optimize labor resource management.

The problem

• Effectively managing labor resources is vital to the health of every hospital. Labor costs typically account for over 50% of total hospital spending, so hospitals that make meaningful improvements in labor utilization can see significant financial benefits. Understanding resource requirements and having the right resources available at the right time leads to increased productivity.
• It’s difficult to identify trends and potential improvement areas in labor management using single-system reports. Meaningful and actionable analysis requires merging data from several systems—EMR, timecard, payroll, and HR data—and interacting dynamically with that data.

Our approach

The Labor Management Explorer application supports collaboration and improved decision-making among your operational and clinical leaders, providing timely and reliable data to uncover opportunities to utilize labor resources more effectively. Metrics such as work hours per unit of service (WHPUOS), departmental volumes, overtime and temp hours per unit, and scheduled and unscheduled PTO are brought together to create a comprehensive and actionable view for better workforce management.

Benefits and features

• Assemble a meaningful picture of your labor utilization. The application merges data from several systems to create a single, comprehensive, and easy-to-consume source of truth for decisions about resource scheduling, skill mix, and workloads.
• Identify and understand trends and variation. Interacting with the data, users can see and explore various dimensions of labor productivity, including staffing budget variance (actual worked and paid hours vs. budgeted worked and paid hours), variance between actual and budgeted premium pay, and unnecessary variation in labor metrics (hours, FTEs, units of service, WHPUOS, or turnover rates). Improvement work to reverse negative trends or reduce unnecessary variation can yield signification ROI for an organization.

Use cases

• A unit manager wants to evaluate the variance between target and actual WHPUOS and identify areas where scheduling/workload alignment could be improved.
• An operational director uses the accelerator to analyze actual premium pay practice vs. budget to identify excess usage; she also examines variance in labor metrics within and between similar labor groups to determine natural variation compared to process variation, leading to opportunities for improvement.
• Clinical and operations leaders uses Labor Management Explorer to inform the development of an on-call strategy to accommodate unpredictable changes in volumes.
• A hospital administrator uses the application to evaluate utilization and explore appropriate cross-departmental resource sharing and staffing to meet daily/weekly variation in unit occupancy.