Enterprise Integration

Track Trends in Staffing Enterprise-wide
Labor management system beats unpredictability, saves money and uses staff’s time more efficiently.
By Beverly Yebernetsky and Jim Kizielewic

Flu outbreaks and medical emergencies don’t happen on schedule. The unpredictability of healthcare makes it difficult for hospitals to staff accurately, leading to expensive overtime and inefficient operations. However, Winchester, VA, based Valley Health System has figured out how to beat the unpredictability, save money and use staff’s time more efficiently through advanced frontline labor management technology.

For years, Valley Health used time and attendance software that only collected its employees’ work hours. That was fine when the organization was smaller, but as it expanded, the system became inadequate for Valley Health’s growing labor management needs. It also put the burden of collecting large amounts of time data on a few people.

Today, Valley Health uses Kronos’ Timekeeper® frontline labor management solution for a cost effective automated time and labor management system. The system makes it easier to track almost 5,000 employees across its dozen facilities in the Shenandoah Valley region and complete payroll by decentralizing data collection and editing, and putting frontline managers in control.

"The biggest problem with our previous system was that it didn’t work across the enterprise. It was fully centralized in the payroll and information systems departments, putting much of the timekeeping burden on a few people," says Beverly Yebernetsky, director of programming and applications at Valley Health System. "We had to edit paper time reports and manually enter data, leaving room for mistakes. As we added new affiliates, the system grew very bulky and unmanageable."

Valley Health rolled the Timekeeper/AS enterprise system out to all 12 of its facilities on an IBM AS/400 platform. Approximately 65 Kronos Timekeeper badge readers gather time and labor information for all hourly employees and volunteers through their bar-coded badges, which double as identification cards.

Expense and Time Reduced

When Valley Health looked for a new labor management system it had to consider its affiliates’ different computing architectures. These range from Winchester Medical Center, whose 3,400 employees worked on a network of PCs, to smaller affiliates and urgent care centers where employees worked on dumb terminals. Valley Health needed a system that would provide everyone with the same functionality, regardless of their architecture.

"A client/server system was out of the question because the smaller facilities that didn’t have networks couldn’t afford to upgrade their $60 dumb terminals to $2,000 networked PCs. Instead we chose an AS/400 system that provides every facility with the same functionality and only requires new affiliates to purchase badge readers," Yebernetsky says.

By decentralizing labor management, Valley Health has taken the burden of verifying time off payroll and IS, giving department supervisors hands-on control of their staff’s time. Previously it took two data entry operators and a payroll clerk the equivalent of a 40-hour week plus overtime —the equivalent of a full-time employee working for a year — to keep payroll on track due to the paper- and labor-intensive timekeeping system.

Each week supervisors can run reports from the Timekeeper/AS software, make changes on line and manage employee information. Transfer of the information from Timekeeper A/S to the hospital’s main payroll system (HBOC Series 2000) occurs through a simple bi-directional interface developed by Kronos with Valley Health. The main payroll system returns updated benefit balances and basic employee information to Timekeeper A/S. From there, payroll takes the hours and converts them into dollars for payment. One person can now complete payroll for all 12 sites a full day earlier than with the previous system.

Getting a Handle on Time

After Valley Health implemented the system, it spotted several trends in the labor data that it had been unable to see before. For example, managers at Valley Health’s Winchester Medical Center used information collected by Timekeeper to adapt staffing based on dynamic needs. They studied how many staff members in its critical care units were sent home for lack of work and how many worked overtime. This enabled the hospital to move people who were below overtime levels to critical care units where staff members were approaching overtime.

The organization also discovered that its pay policies were not uniform across all affiliates. Valley Health solved this problem by simplifying policies and procedures throughout the organization and programming those policies into the system, achieving consistent pay practices across the enterprise and more accurate payroll payments for all employees.

Timekeeper is also helping Valley Health manage attendance, including tracking trends in employee absenteeism. Every time punch includes a comment field enabling employees to enter reasons for their absence. For example, if a supervisor sees that an employee’s family member has been sick for an extended time, requiring the employee to miss work, the supervisor might suggest the employee apply for the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

With easy access to such comprehensive labor management data, Valley Health System has all the information it needs on line and in real time to more efficiently manage its labor now and in the future.

Beverly Yebernetsky is director of information systems at Valley Health System, Winchester, VA. Jim Kizielewicz is vice president of marketing for Kronos, Inc., Waltham, MA.