Kronos® Extends Leadership in Healthcare with New Capabilities to Optimize Nurse Schedules and Minimize Compliance Risk
Enables healthcare organizations to balance quality care and labor costs
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CHELMSFORD, Mass., Feb. 25, 2009 — Kronos® Incorporated today introduced new capabilities for healthcare organizations. With the introduction of version 6.1 of the Workforce Central® suite, the Kronos employee scheduling solution optimizes nurse schedules and helps healthcare organizations control labor costs and improve workforce productivity. In addition, the latest version helps to minimize compliance risk by tracking staffing details required by Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) regulations.
“In the current macro-economic climate, healthcare organizations are focused more than ever on improving productivity,” said Brian Graves, global practice leader of healthcare at Kronos. “At Kronos, we’re committed to building solutions that make critical workforce processes more efficient, resulting directly in reduced costs, improved productivity, and enhanced support for delivery of quality care.”
Self-service enhances employee scheduling capabilities
Actively engaging employees in the scheduling process is critical to increasing manager productivity, improving employee satisfaction, and ultimately producing a more cost-effective schedule that meets the needs of the organization. In Workforce Central 6.1, employees are now able to set their schedule preferences, view open shifts, and request to fill those shifts as they become available. Version 6.1 also enables employees to request open shifts as they become available. Employees can see — on a single screen — all the information necessary to guide them through planning a change to their schedules.
Managers, in turn, can quickly and easily view open shift requests and approve the right skilled staff to fill open shifts. They view schedule-related requests from employees and edit shifts from a single screen. This simplifies the approval process and helps managers understand the overall impact of schedule changes.
Effective decision support
Workforce Central 6.1 also includes an improved assignments decision support tool to better align labor with demand as workload changes in a 24/7 environment. The Kronos solution helps managers optimize in-house staff coverage and minimize overtime and agency costs by identifying qualified individuals and transferring them from areas of over-coverage to where they are needed. The solution also assigns employees to shifts by skills, certifications, and preferences, thereby automating compliance management.
“We have experienced substantial success relating to cost savings over the years by streamlining the employee scheduling process with Kronos,” said Susan Marino, RN, director of nursing informatics at Hartford Hospital. “Other Kronos benefits include tracking productive and non-productive staff time, managing attendance and improved accuracy and alignment of payroll with our human resource policies. Additionally, Kronos provides a sophisticated report for licenses, skills, and certifications that is available to all unit managers as well as scheduling alerts identifying expirations. Electronic tracking of staff competency promotes patient safety and is a focus of new legislature in Connecticut that is well supported by Kronos.”
Minimized compliance risk
As part of its mission to set standards for healthcare organizations and issue accreditation to organizations that meet those standards, JCAHO looks to ensure that sufficient qualified staff is always present to deliver quality care. The organization conducts periodic on-site surveys, checking on what happened on a given day and how those events determined the staffing plan. Users must be able to retrace the events that triggered changes to the schedule and explain the results. Workforce Central 6.1 makes critical scheduling and labor information available in real time, and keeps appropriate audit trails, reducing the time and effort needed for JCAHO audits, while increasing the accuracy of the results.
These new capabilities for healthcare organizations are available in Workforce Central 6.1 (see “Kronos Announces Availability of Workforce Central 6.1”). For more information regarding Kronos solutions call (800) 225-1561.
About Kronos Incorporated
Kronos is the global leader in workforce management solutions that enable organizations to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. Tens of thousands of organizations in 60 countries — including more than half of the Fortune 1000® — use Kronos time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, HR and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics applications. To learn how Kronos uniquely delivers complete automation and high-quality information in an easy-to-own solution, visit www.kronos.com.
© 2009 Kronos Incorporated. Kronos, Workforce Central, and the Kronos logo are registered trademarks of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. All other product and company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.