PowerLabor

The PowerLabor™ application provides, a comprehensive AI-equipped view of healthcare labor data by system, department, team, and job role, including special contract and pay categories. The embedded AI forecasting predicts patient volumes, allowing for more proactive resource scheduling to decrease waste and increase productivity while ensuring resources for excellent patient care.

PowerLabor enables your managers to plan staffing needs proactively and accurately.

The problem

Labor costs encompass between 50% and 60% of the typical healthcare budget and are growing faster than healthcare systems can afford. COVID-19 responses exacerbated this financial pressure sending health systems scrambling to find any labor dollar leaks. Getting control of escalating labor costs means eliminating waste. To do that, you must use data to find where budgeted staffing hours exceed or fall short of patient needs. But most organizations have the wrong tools to do this effectively, trying to guess at future patient volumes (and staffing needs) by using retrospective data that lacks timeliness.

Our approach

PowerLabor combines modern technology, AI, and world-class expertise to give you the best labor productivity outcomes.

With PowerLabor, operational users get a new level of timely, accurate, actionable labor data equipped with the AI forecasting capabilities healthcare systems need to close the gap between required staffing and future patient volumes. Users can get the answers they need fast to control labor expenses and quickly see if they’re hitting budgeted targets to root out the cause of any gaps.

Benefits and features

• Decrease labor costs and optimize resource allocation. Manage labor by volume to reduce labor spend per unit of service for all departments.
• Forecast patient volumes and proactively schedule to volume. Quickly look at trending, comparisons, and rollups across departments and proactively predict day-of-the-week needs using seasonal patterns.
• Analyze a comprehensive view of labor. Data includes overtime, holidays, contract and premium hours and cost, and staffing mix in an integrated view of all data in one location.
• Optimize your labor agreements. Plan for changes/fluctuations in labor agreements and implement better staffing ratios.
• Drive adoption with timely, accurate, actionable data and professional training. Our technical and labor experts perform a preliminary assessment to help ensure that the multiple data sources leveraged by PowerLabor— EMR, billing, HR/payroll, time and attendance, general ledger, etc.—are integrated and tuned to your organization’s needs. Our implementation teams provide train-the-trainer sessions to drive adoption.
• Extend the value of PowerLabor via additional Labor Management Expert Services. Our most successful client partners engage our team for a range of strategic and operational guidance—including deep-dive assessment, strategy deployment, expanded education, and ad-hoc consulting.

Use cases

• A department manager wants to evaluate the variance between target and actual worked hours per unit of service (WHPUOS) and identify areas where scheduling/workload alignment could be improved. Using PowerLabor, he identifies that he is consistently short staffed on Saturdays and overstaffed on Wednesdays. He adjusts schedules to better meet patient needs.
• An operational director reviews the PowerLabor dashboard to analyze key measures for the seven departments she oversees. She identifies one department that is consistently overstaffed compared to volume. The director reaches out to the manager to identify root cause and determine appropriate changes to the schedule.
• A unit manager assesses volume forecasts for the next 14 days using the Forecasting tab of PowerLabor. He notes that they’re possibly understaffed on a few days. He develops an on-call strategy to accommodate changes in volumes and works with another department to facilitate cross-departmental resource sharing and staffing to meet daily/weekly variation in unit occupancy.
• Another department manager reviews her PowerLabor report and determines she is underbudget on hours per unit, but overbudget on cost per unit. She discovers her department used overtime instead of regular time to cover shifts, resulting in higher staffing costs.