Labor Management Expert Services

Health Catalyst’s Labor Management Expert Services facilitate a strategic and data-driven approach to understanding and improving healthcare labor costs, provider productivity, process efficiency, and workforce planning. Services can be tailored to organization needs and may include assessment and opportunity analysis, strategy deployment, expanded education services, or focused labor management consulting.

The problem

Labor costs are the single largest expense item for most hospitals, often exceeding 60% of net patient revenue. Organizations need to manage their labor spend to keep pace with revenues—but without a holistic view and a strategic approach, many leaders struggle to make changes that accommodate the complexity of healthcare and work to the benefit of staff and patients.

Our approach

With deep experience in healthcare labor, analytics, governance, and process improvement, our team partners with you to devise and implement strategies, structures, and practices for short-and long-term labor management success.

Central to our approach is a focus on identifying the data and metrics you need to understand your system’s labor needs, resources, costs, and efficiency. With decades of experience in healthcare finance and operations, our consultants deliver guidance to assemble and interpret timely and holistic views of labor utilization and productivity—revealing trends, variances, and drivers that help you manage labor more proactively and strategically.

Benefits and components

Our Labor Management Strategic Assessment offering provides a comprehensive assessment and analysis of your current state capabilities—and delivers quantitative and qualitative findings and actionable recommendations for improvement. The goal is to identify your best opportunities to save costs, increase efficiency, and improve labor planning and management. The offering typically includes the following elements:

• Interviews and surveys with key stakeholders to understand overall operations, staffing models, labor practices, data and reporting tools and processes, staff development and engagement practices, labor productivity, and change readiness
• Expert analysis and a summary report of findings
• A prioritized summary of recommendations
• A detailed action plan including a timeline and estimate of required resources

Our Labor Management Strategy Operationalization offering helps your organization execute labor management improvement initiatives. Our experts can tailor an implementation plan and operational model that is grounded in your current realities and aligned with your overall strategy and vision. Depending on your needs and the scope of planned changes, our team’s support may include:

• Establishing and implementing a governance and accountability structure
• Standardizing units of service, data, and reports
• Redesigning reporting and review processes
• Developing position control processes
• Providing at-the-elbow analytic and technical expertise

Our Labor Management Expanded Education Program helps build your organization’s capability for labor management excellence. The program includes a series of educational sessions and skill-development workshops that employ a practical, case-based approach to help leaders, managers, and analysts use labor data for better decisions. Elements include:

• Effective use of data and reporting tools
• An enhanced outcomes improvement approach
• Vision for the future (awareness of changes on the horizon in healthcare)
• Productivity and productivity management
• Scheduling, staffing, and volume matching
• Staffing management

Ad-hoc Labor Management Consulting offers flexible, focused ad-hoc consulting for any aspect of labor management operations and performance of a department, series of departments, or the overall organization.