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Customer Insights: Baton Rouge General
Learn how implementing ShiftWise solved for inefficiencies, cost overruns and employee dissatisfaction.
Baton Rouge General Medical Center is a full-service community hospital with 544 licensed beds across two campuses. As the first hospital in Baton Rouge, opening its doors in 1900, Baton Rouge General has a long history of groundbreaking milestones, as well as providing the Greater Baton Rouge community with high-quality health care for generations.
THE CHALLENGE: Manual processes are costly and time-consuming
With 3,000 employees and nearly 600 patient beds across two campuses, the daily staffing needs at Louisiana’s Baton Rouge General are significant. By 2012, the continuous need for staff to fill vacant shifts had overwhelmed the manual process used to manage the resource pool for decades.
“Float pool managers were literally doing everything using a pencil, paper and the phone,” says Baton Rouge General’s Director of Employment and HR Services Anne Segura. “If there was a vacant shift they would call through the resource pool list to see who was available. Often there was only one person in the staffing office, and that person was also in charge of handling phone calls from staffers picking up or cancelling a shift. Employees were getting frustrated because it was often difficult to reach the office by phone and they were being pressured to take shifts they didn’t want. Because of this process, many shifts were being filled at the last minute or not at all.”
This arrangement created challenges and unnecessary costs for the hospital. When a shift went unfilled, there were two options: a staffer would be required to take mandatory overtime or a forced call-in, or the patient capacity for the unit would be temporarily reduced to account for lower staff levels. Forcing staff to work extra hours created employee issues, jeopardized patient satisfaction and racked up unneeded overtime costs for the hospital; reducing patient capacity led to lost revenue.
THE SOLUTION: Taming the Crisis
When Baton Rouge General’s Human Resources Department took over management of the hospital’s float pool, they knew the antiquated ‘pencil and paper’ status quo was no longer be viable. They immediately began researching solutions for automating and optimizing this process.
“We talked with a lot of solution vendors, but for us the decision to go with ShiftWise Connect was an easy one,” says Segura. “One of the biggest appeals was that unlike most of the other vendors, ShiftWise is an independent company that is not owned or affiliated with a staffing organization. We didn’t like the idea of the fox watching the hen house.”
According to Segura, another driver for the decision to choose ShiftWise was the ability to save time and money by invoicing all contract dollars spent in one bi-weekly form. “We were spending a lot of time and energy reconciling vendor invoices to our own records,” she says. “We went from signing a dozen forms a week to handling just one simple form, bi-weekly.”
Hospital administrators were also pleased with the smooth implementation. “It was extremely well organized,” says Segura. “I’ve been through many technology implementations and this was by far the best-organized one. ShiftWise worked with us closely throughout the process and has been incredibly responsive to our needs.”
Other time and cost savings come as a result of streamlining the verification of credentials and document tracking for contract workers. ShiftWise automatically ensures that any staff that match to an order whether they are internal or external employees meet all of BRG’s unique credentialing requirements.
Once all resource pool staff and external agency staff are verified online, ShiftWise allows each qualified staff to book directly to a shift without a time-consuming manual processes or phone tag. As a result, managers can spend more time on mission-critical activities like recruitment and retention, and staff gain more control over their schedules and lives. “Float pool staffers pick that type of job because they want control of their schedule,” says Segura. “With ShiftWise Connect you can make your own hours, and as an HR department we’re looking for-ward to capitalizing on that as a retention and recruiting tool.”
ShiftWise Connect is also contributing to an important culture shift within the hospital. “In the past it has been an acceptable practice to work in ‘fire mode’, filling shifts just four hours out with a constant sense of urgency,” says Segura. “ShiftWise is enabling our units to adopt a schedule vision. Planning in advance allows them to ensure they have the right person for each shift, which contributes to patient and employee satisfac-tion.”
Ultimately, hospital executives believe ShiftWise Connect will help them realize their mission and vision. “As a hospital system, we’re in growth mode,” says Segura. “We’re looking for greater efficiency and increased productivity. By using ShiftWise Con-nect we accomplish this with happier staff and a smarter way of working that leads to time and cost savings.”
