Summary

The client is one of the largest and most expansive health systems in the United States, with 49 hospitals and more than 60,000 employees providing care for people in seven states – Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, and Virginia. The client is dedicated to continually improving health care quality, safety and cost effectiveness. Its hospitals, other facilities and clinicians are recognized for clinical and operational excellence.

Challenge

Like most healthcare providers, the client needed to control its labor costs, and especially its costs for contingent clinicians, while maintaining and enhancing the flexibility that contingent labor provides. Flexibility in healthcare staffing became exponentially more important in the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath – an era of continuing clinician shortages and technological advancements that are transforming the healthcare workforce.

At the same time, the client needed improved billing transparency for contingent staffing to attain greater accuracy in enterprise, facility and departmental budgeting and spending projections. Improving retention among its core staff has always been a critical objective for the client, so it was essential to maintain and enhance retention as part of new efforts to support the client’s staffing. Surveys show that among the difficulties driving clinical staff away from their professions are the needs for greater support and adequate staffing to ensure effective coverage and reduce overwork.

Partnership

The client entered a partnership with the Ingenovis Health family of companies to help transform the health system’s contingent staffing into a more effective and efficient operation for quality patient care. Ingenovis Talent Operations, or ITO, represents an advancement on the traditional offerings of an MSP and vendor-neutral VMS, providing:

Dedicated ITO clinical and client success teams created strong relationships with the clinical leaders and maintained transparency in all clinical and business matters while leading the development and implementation of the client’s internal resource pool.

Results

After one year of the ITO Partnership, the client was able to reduce its average contingent nursing bill rate by 7% — for a 20% overall year-over-year reduction in the system’s contingent nursing spend. That represents a significant improvement for the client, as it would for any health system.

The Partnership also created a internal resource pool, which improved operational efficiency, enhanced fidelity to the client’s culture, and bolstered quality through greater continuity of care.

A data-informed approach to bill rates, with dedicated billing support and full utilization of VMS, provided the greater transparency and accountability that the client sought for improvements in overall efficiency and predictability in budgeting and labor spend projections.

The Ingenovis investment in quality improvements and career coaching, conducted by a dedicated onsite clinical leader providing training in state-of-the-science practices, resulted in significant improvements in quality and retention.

Partnership actions resulted in converting 168 nurses to the client’s core staff within one year.

Conclusion

The ITO approach to addressing clinical staffing-related challenges of the post-COVID-19 era, a time of innovation in supportive technology driven by continuing shortages of nurses and other clinicians, proved to be an effective system to help the client solve its pressing workforce challenges. ITO significantly reduced contingent labor costs, created an internal resource pool for greater staffing flexibility, improved billing transparency for contingent staffing, and helped convert a large number of nurses to the client’s core staff. Equally as important, the dedicated ITO team created a true partnership committed to the realization of the client’s objectives to transform its contingent labor environment.

If you would like more information, please email Jonathan.Murphy@IngenovisHealth.com

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