With two illustrious not-for-profit acute care facilities in Mountain View and Los Gatos, El Camino Health serves inhabitants of the San Francisco Bay Area. The health program also includes 19 facilities. El Camino, like so many other health systems, had the twin issues of having higher employee retention issues and overloaded nurse managers during the epidemic and in its aftermath. THE CHALLENGEPre-pandemic, a strength of the health system had been consistently maintaining an RN nurse turnover rate of only 5 % – but that jumped to 12 % during the COVID-19 crisis. Employee wedding was a strongly related issue. Nurse managers are incredibly valuable to both the employer and the individual knowledge, and El Camino was aware of the importance of increasing their support in order to turn things around and restore the organization’s engagement and retention levels. The chief care agent at El Camino Health, Cheryl Reinking, DNP, RN, explained that “nurse professionals at our two facilities were managing heightened loads, but those workloads were also becoming more complicated and overwhelming, eventually causing them to disengage from their teams and raise the risk of stress.” We knew we needed to develop to make this genuine for our managers, and we knew it was important to find ways to help more regular, meaningful interactions between managers and team members. Our main priority was to make our leaders ‘ daily tasks simpler, and how they did it, according to Laudio’s system, a health IT seller. The system was created specifically to organize and simplify the work of frontline managers. It made it possible for managers to lessen their core processes and the number of techniques they needed to communicate with frequently, which reduced their level of complexity and freed up valuable time to be allocated to their teams, according to Reinking. Our managers may have a real hotspot for their function, powered by appropriate data from systems of report like our HRIS, she noted. The platform’s AI and built-in workflows even provided capabilities that made it simpler for our managers to capture opportunities for fast, personalized engagement with their unique team members, from birthday celebrations to employee recognition for acts of excellence, such as making sure check-ins took place with staff at crucial intervals,” she continued. With the innovative technology, managers wouldn’t have to go looking for or keeping track of it on their own because the system would covering it through active recommendations and actually discover opportunities for recognition that humans couldn’t easily recognize on their own in a sea of data, she said. overcoming the QUESTIONS TECHNICALLY El Camino Health has been able to provide nurse managers with a book centralized process hub designed to optimize, automate, and help promote their work. Inclusion with other devices was a must-have as the health system looked at various possible solutions. The Laudio system is built on top of a strong HRIS that we already have in place, pulling information from it and making that data more manageable, Reinking explained. For instance, the system uses AI to give managers powerful recommendations for impactful, personalized actions they can get with their team members and make those recommendations work more effectively, she continued. With this program, our managers don’t have to go looking for the data because it presents insights and actions, which free up so much time for understanding and analysis. ” Nurse professionals usually have a large number of direct reports and a wide range of different tasks. They used to have to use so many unique systems to achieve their main tasks, but now the system allows them to have regular, best-practice staff engagement.” It’s not just another’thing’ for managers; it’s really making their work more effective and allowing them to spend more time on the areas of leadership that are most fulfilling for managers,” she added. ResultsEl Camino Health’s success in returning the RN retention rate to pre-pandemic levels has been largely due to the new platform. The health system has reduced RN turnover by seven percentage points, which is now back to roughly 95 % RN retention.” Reinking reported” results in a number of advantages for our organization, our staff, and our patients. In our highly competitive market, restoring retention has saved us almost$ 850,000 in RN replacement costs, not to mention all of the significant time investments required to find and train new RNs. ” We’ve also improved our employee engagement indicator scores”, she continued. Leaders who are considered strong Laudio platform users have improved their leader index scores more than their less active counterparts, according to her remarks. This is a clear indication of the power of a platform that helps leaders adhere to best practices and maintain consistent and meaningful communication with their team members, she said. The most exciting aspect of our work is that we’ve done all of this while also facilitating the shift of focus for our nurse managers to their teams, she said. We are constantly finding new ways to do things faster and better by centralizeding and completing them on the platform, she continued,” We have improved engagement and retention and operational efficiency. We have also improved operational efficiency. We have also recently incorporated another important leader workflow, boosting efficiency and reaping the benefits of an integrated platform. Our leaders are giving us a lot of positive feedback about how happy they are that these crucial workflows are now available on the platform. ADVICE FOR OTHERSWhen considering technology for nurse managers, Reinking advised that it should be evaluated in terms of how it will fit into the daily realities of their roles and the other systems in use. ” she asked”. Does it integrate with other systems in use, extract data from them, and actually reduce the number of places a manager has to log into, or does it add value to the already-existing tech stack? ” Be sure to get an understanding of how much direct user research the vendor does for feedback and product development, too”, she continued. Assess whether they are designing technology with the needs of nurse leaders in mind, or if what you’re considering is a more general solution for many different job types, she continued. The scope and actionability of the data in any new system are also important factors. ” Hospitals and health systems frequently have so many different systems in use and so much data technically available, but managers don’t have the time to go looking for insights every day,” she said. ” Instead, they need takeaways to be surfaced up to them and, ideally, those insights should be accompanied by clear and actionable next steps”, she concluded. ” And the time spent acting upon the insights must lead to the outcomes and goals they are expecting to achieve, such as improved staff engagement” .Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on Linked In: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss .org
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