How to Develop a Sustainable Healthcare Workforce Management Strategy

Whether you handle nurse staffing at a small skilled nursing facility or a large hospital system, you have your work cut out. As the nursing shortage continues, so does the uphill battle of maintaining optimal staffing levels and positive patient outcomes without adding labor costs. While no easy feat, winning the battle is possible with the proper artillery. That's where ShiftMed and UKG Dimensions™ come in.

Together, ShiftMed and UKG can help your healthcare organization navigate the complexities of nurse staffing in a complex industry. All it takes is a simple API integration to get these two leading technology platforms working together to establish a sustainable healthcare workforce management strategy.

3 Staples of Healthcare Workforce Management

To decrease your labor costs, increase your operational efficiencies, and maintain positive patient outcomes, you need to optimize your recruitment, scheduling, and retention efforts.

1. Recruitment Pipeline

Labor is typically a healthcare organization's highest expense, so it makes sense why many facilities start cutting here when trying to save money. However, nurse staffing isn't an area you want to skimp on—and as you'll soon see, you don't have to. Nurses are a valuable resource for healthcare facilities. When patients receive safe, quality care and outcomes improve, facilities have greater financial stability.

To maintain optimal nurse staffing levels, your healthcare facility can save on labor costs by using ShiftMed for on-demand clinical support. We're always recruiting and onboarding nurses (CNAs, LPNs, and RNs) for our nationwide network of more than 350,000 healthcare professionals.

So, when you have open shifts, you can rely on ShiftMed to fill those slots quickly with nurses in your community—not expensive travel nurses. We properly vet every nurse in our network, so you don't have to. We verify their credentials and perform required background checks—saving your facility time and money.

While our nurses are available to work on a per diem, short-term or long-term basis, if you want to add a nurse to your full-time staff, you can do so without paying a buyout or transfer fee.

2. Scheduling Efficiency

The ShiftMed and UKG technology platforms seamlessly work together so healthcare facilities that utilize both can easily manage their in-house and on-demand staff in one location.

By centralizing this information, your healthcare facility can make data-driven decisions that increase scheduling efficiency, decrease operational costs, and improve PBJ data accuracy.

Schedulers and supervisors can see the full scope of your labor operations in real-time, allowing for immediate analysis of your staffing needs and costs.

Furthermore, our predictive analytics can help you forecast your facility's labor needs and achieve your HPPD goals. In other words, our analytics prevent you from under-posting shifts and being short-staffed or over-posting shifts and paying cancellation fees.

We also make it easy to stay ahead of the staffing curve by delivering data and insights that compare your return, cancel, and pay rates with comps in your area.

3. Retention Strategies

While nursing is a highly respected and meaningful career path, it's a field known for having high turnover—and the nursing shortage has only compounded the problem. According to Post University, the average turnover cost for a single bedside RN is $44,400. That said, keeping your internal nursing staff happy is essential.

According to our 2022 State of Nursing Report, 64% of our nurse respondents cited staffing shortages as one of their top concerns. When asked how the nursing shortage has negatively impacted them, here's what they said:

• 54% work more hours or longer shifts.

• 43% have a larger patient load than what's feasible.

• 40% feel their mental health has suffered.

• 28% had time-off requests denied.

Using on-demand ShiftMed nurses to fill shifts saves you on overtime costs, gives your internal nursing staff the time off they deserve, and maintains adequate nurse-to-patient ratios. More importantly, your full-time nurses will stay energized and have the mental and physical capacity to provide the best possible patient care.

ShiftMed also takes the retention of its on-demand staff seriously. We reward our nurses via a comprehensive suite of perks, so they continue to show up for your shifts with their best foot forward.

How the ShiftMed UKG Integration Works

The ShiftMed and UKG connection is a back-end integration that enables data sharing between the two platforms so that you can manage your internal and external staffing pools in one place. Here are some of the UKG integration highlights:

• When a ShiftMed nurse claims one of your shifts, their employee record instantly generates in UKG, allowing you to review, schedule, and update their information alongside your internal nursing staff. It's easy to identify ShiftMed workers in UKG because they show up as such in the system.

• Shifts posted with ShiftMed display in UKG, so when a ShiftMed nurse claims one of your shifts, they are auto-assigned to your schedule.

• ShiftMed tracks the clock-in and clock-out times for our on-demand nursing staff and synchronizes the data with your UKG timesheets—so you don't have to worry about manual reconciliations.

Check out ShiftMed on the UKG Marketplace.

Ready to make the right connections in nurse staffing?

As you can see, ShiftMed and UKG make it easy for healthcare facilities to develop a sustainable workforce management strategy. So, what are you waiting for? Request a demo to learn more about how we can help your facility deliver more positive patient outcomes while saving 3% on nurse staffing.