Staffing and nurse turnover continues to top the list of nursing home concerns—87% are facing moderate to high staffing shortages while 98% are having difficulty hiring staff. At the same time, the recruiting pool of full-time nurses is dwindling, with one out of three nurses planning on leaving their jobs before the end of 2022.
For CEOs willing to refresh their tech strategy, this can be an opportunity for positive change—a chance to address staffing, clinical, and financial challenges simultaneously. Here are some examples for forward-thinking healthcare leaders to consider.
Assess Your Nurse Experience Baseline
Before considering any tech decisions, it’s critical to determine your starting point and how your staffing strategy is driving your clinician experience.
Inadequate staffing can be a key driver of nurse burnout. According to a 2021 secondary analysis of cross-sectional survey data of over 50,000 registered nurses, over 60% who reported leaving or considering leaving their jobs cited inadequate staffing as a reason.
But successful changes to your tech strategy requires understanding what your nurses need today. This means taking an objective look at your retention and turnover and seeking areas where your full-time nurses could benefit from changes—such as high-level changes to your float pool support, EHR, improved scheduling, or reducing burnout levels.
Employ Float Pool Tech to Cut Hefty Agency Bills
Float pool technology gets to the administrative root of nurse turnover challenges.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, float pool nurses were heralded as coming to the rescue of providers, bringing with them cost savings, improving quality of care, and increasing patient safety. Today, nurse float pool tech has advanced to a point where post-acute CEOs anxious about starting their own pools as an alternative to agencies should take a second look.
The American Health Care Association projects nursing home operating margins will drop to a negative 4.8% as a result of cuts to the Patient Driven Payment Model (PDPM). CEO concerns that negative margins and lower census are a persistent hurdle to profitability are valid—but there is a possibility to address both margins and census concerns through your use of float pool nursing so that you improve the experience of full-time nurses to decrease turnover.
Post-acute CEOs now have access to custom-fit platforms designed to help them build their own, in-house nursing workforce—cutting the flow of big agency bills. This is especially true in post-acute scenarios where almost half of the nursing workforce is walking away from full-time roles. Highly-aligned float pool management technology can help you both increase census revenue while reducing staff turnover. To learn more about Float Pool Management talk to IntelyCare.
Enhance Your EHR to Customize Turnover Reduction Strategy
Many healthcare CEOs are starting their tech refresh by upgrading their EHR to improve productivity and workflows—a step that can directly translate to improvements in nurse retention. Non-clinical tasks can be a significant burden on the experience of your nurse professionals. Your nurses could be spending as much as 50% of their time on clinical documentation.
Tech vendors across the industry are also working to make systems more adaptable to your needs as a post-acute CEO. This has included advancements like improved EHR configurability, creating the options of speciality-specific and even personal workflows. Others are delving into natural language processing (NLP) and AI to optimize EHR request routing. The results have been a 40% reduction in tasks within the EHR.
Use AI to Understand the Nurse Experience
Long term care has been hit especially hard by the “Great Resignation”, and according to McKinsey, a feeling that leaders don’t care could be a leading reason nursing staff are looking elsewhere.
To create an environment where your nurse professionals feel freer to share their thoughts and more connected to leadership, consider leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). You have options including interactive AI chat bots and opt-in monitoring systems that allow leadership to calculate a staff member’s risk of attrition.
Dig Into Data for Deeper Insights Into Nursing
Comprehensive data analytics is an advanced step for many organizations, but it’s one that can provide significant insights into the nurse experience.
Emerging solutions feature dashboards that allow leaders to leverage the platform for PDPM insights and an understanding of key performance indicators, including improvements on the nursing side.
We want to help you get started on identifying your best-fit solution to reduce nurse turnover. You can begin exploring how technology enables leaders like you to recruit and retain the nurses that maximize census and profitability, all while improving the experience of your dedicated full-time staff. Let’s start a conversation.
Megan is a business writer with over 15 years’ experience in healthcare enterprise technology. She holds an MBA and B.S. in Healthcare Administration. She now keeps an ongoing eye on the latest developments and successes in healthcare admin technology and the people who use it to build a better world for providers, patients, and their care communities.