Masonicare

Large Healthcare Provider Significantly Reduces Labor Costs, Improves Oversight with Kronos^®

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Masonicare is Connecticut’s largest provider of healthcare and retirement living services for seniors. The nonprofit organization provides care for seniors and orphans through skilled nursing and rehabilitation facilities, a continuing care retirement community, assisted living communities, a residential care home, and statewide home healthcare and hospice services.

Manual and decentralized processes for scheduling nurses at the organization’s main facilities were creating major issues: staffing inefficiencies. Unbudgeted staffing expenses. Unapproved overtime. And increased agency expenses, since unit managers often relied on easier, “always available” nurses rather than calling in the best resources at the most cost-effective rates.

To make matters worse, lack of visibility and real-time access to budgeted, scheduled, and actual staffing data prohibited management from proactively addressing rising supplemental labor expenses, as budget variances were not evident until it was too late.

Masonicare turned to Kronos for Healthcare’s Workforce Scheduler to solve these issues. “The Kronos system has been a tremendous success for us,” notes James Albert, vice president for information systems and CIO at Masonicare. “We’ve seen significant dollar savings in both overtime and pool staff costs. The number of openings in the schedule was greatly reduced by having control over knowing who to plug in and how to plug them in.”

Scheduling control improves staffing oversight productivity

Before implementing Workforce Scheduler, Masonicare central office employees who scheduled unit staff were often unaware of the needs of individual medical units. This situation sometimes resulted in unit staffing levels that did not match budgets or resident care needs.

“From a nursing perspective, we wanted better visibility and control in the scheduling process and increased accountability from managers for their units,” says Bea Coulombe, vice president for patient care services. “The Kronos for Healthcare scheduling system has given us the tools, controls, and reporting capabilities with which to look at our staffing in relation to our budget numbers.”

At a glance, unit managers can review current staffing. Compare it to required staffing. And make timely adjustments. “The scheduling system lets you know who is a per diem person, who is going to be in overtime, and the most cost-effective way to fill your gaps,” adds Coulombe.

With high-quality, real-time information easily available, filling shift positions is simplified. And workforce productivity has increased. Using Workforce Scheduler, 15 staff members schedule approximately 500 nurses and certified nurses aide (CNA) staff at two facilities. Three others schedule 250 nursing staff at another Masonicare facility.

Agency staffing hours reduced 75 percent

Masonicare had been relying heavily on agency pool staff to fill open shift positions, averaging about 1,000 hours a week for these staff.

“We couldn’t reduce pool staff until we knew what our numbers were and what they needed to be,” explains Jane LaPrino, director of MIS. “Using real-time data in the Kronos scheduling system, our MIS department worked closely with nursing to collaborate and customize the daily reports they needed to quickly track productivity and expenses.”

Now with Kronos, labors costs have been reigned in. Masonicare reduced agency pool staff hours to fewer than 200 hours per week. The CNA pool has been eliminated at one facility and almost eliminated at another. And now Masonicare spends less than $10,000 a week on pool staff for RNs — down from $45,000+ each week — with expenditures some weeks below $6,000. And this amount continues to drop.

Significant cost savings in overtime and pool staffing

While using the reporting information to reduce pool staff, Masonicare was careful to hold the line on overtime hours of full-time staff. Its solution was to better utilize in-house staff and selectively hire additional employees to fill vacant shift positions.

Before the system was in place, Masonicare was racking up more than 700 hours per week in overtime, in addition to 1,000 hours in pool staff time. With its Kronos for Healthcare scheduling solution, Masonicare saved approximately $500,000 in supplemental labor costs in the first four months following implementation, of which 25 percent was attributed directly to Workforce Scheduler. Over the course of a year, Masonicare estimates it will save about $1.4 million in supplemental labor costs.

Reporting system increases staff accountability

The organization has also seen increased staffing accountability. “The information is right at your fingertips,” notes Melinda Schoen, assistant director of nursing. “We’re looking at one system, not multiple systems, so we can easily look at someone’s schedule and see if they’re late or absent.”

This accountability extends to improved oversight of individual units, including weekends when the central staffing office is not open. “We can lose our entire budget on the weekend,” says Coulombe. Now, with real-time tracking of staff, there are no surprises. If nursing supervisors want to call in pool staff for a weekend day shift, they must first call management for approval.

Agencies see accountability benefits

The Kronos system has improved accountability for pool staff agencies as well. Now pool staff swipes in and out of the system. Actual timekeeping information is captured. Questionable signed timesheets are gone. And a tremendous amount of pool staff overtime is eliminated.

An added benefit is direct, real-time billing of staffing agencies from Kronos reports. “The reports tell an agency exactly when a nurse has been here,” explains Albert. “When we said we would give them real data and that is all the hours we are going to pay for, they didn’t argue.”

Scheduling solution to expand enterprisewide

Based on the success of Workforce Scheduler, Masonicare is looking to expand the use of its Kronos solution. The company plans to introduce the system’s shift sign-up and self-scheduling options to give employees increased control over their schedules, with management oversight.

A clear advantage of the Kronos for Healthcare solution is its enterprisewide scheduling system, which allows Masonicare to better manage its labor resources for maximum efficiency. The result: optimized and equitable scheduling that has reduced labor costs and improved workforce productivity.