One Cure For Staffing WoesOne Cure For Staffing Woes

Like many large health-care companies with multiple facilities, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center depends on nurses from dozens of temporary-staffing agencies.

Because of the industrywide nursing shortage, staffing agencies compete to attract talent, which often means upping wages for temporary workers. Those costs are passed on to customers like the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; on any given day, it could have hundreds of agency-provided nurses at its 19 hospitals, health centers, and senior-living facilities.

But the medical center wasn't using that buying power to its full benefit. "We needed to leverage our size in the marketplace to get the best rates, best talent, and reduce the vendor list," says Mark Raketich, director of temporary services.

Demand is unpredictable, and matching people to need is complex, since the skills and certifications of a critical-care nurse aren't the same as those of an operating-room nurse. This system has revolved around paperwork, phone calls, and faxes. That meant even staffing coordinators at individual facilities had a hard time knowing how much they spent on agency-provided nurses.

"To ensure that we'd be able to exert some kind of control over what agencies our facilities were using, we needed to get a vendor-management system," Raketich says.

Earlier this year, IQNavigator Inc. pitched its spending-management and procurement software to help the medical center handle technical support. Managing temp nurses was a more pressing problem for the medical center, but IQNavigator had little experience in health care. So, together the companies tweaked the software for the medical center's temporary nursing needs.

Instead of staffing coordinators haggling on the phone with agencies about pricing and the credentials of a temp nurse, the IQNavigator software shows the contracted terms with agencies. It also lets facility managers post staffing requirements on the Web, and agencies respond by sending candidate names electronically. Medical center coordinators can then electronically access information from the agencies about nurses' credentials.

"It's now much easier to track whether a nurse's license needs renewal or whether a critical-care candidate has received the needed training and certifications," says June Hanecek, administrative assistant to the senior VP of patient services at McKeesport Hospital.

At McKeesport, the system has reduced the number of phone calls involved with temporary staffing processes by at least 60% and has reduced the amount of time Hanecek spends paying invoices by 75%.

Raketich declined to disclose the exact cost of IQNavigator but says it didn't require any new capital-equipment spending and the software was in the "low five digits."

Other HR application vendors have targeted health-care organizations. St. Mary's Medical Center, a 440-bed community hospital in Huntington, West Va., recently deployed a module from Kronos Inc. to deal with scheduling nurses and other clinical staff. Dave Imhoff, St. Mary's associate director of information services, says Kronos' scheduling and electronic time-card system cut about 40% of the time it took for those processes.

In Pittsburgh, the tool should help the medical center make better decisions on two fronts, Raketich says. First, by better understanding staffing, it can decide if issues are facility-specific or are systemwide. Second, it plans to use the information on each vendor to get more-objective measures of their performance to use in contract negotiations.

The software also offers quality control. If a facility stops using a temp because of problems, the system will alert other facilities not to hire that person. Says Raketich, "Now we don't shift a problem from one facility to the next."