In this episode, Kerry recaps the recent webinar between AMN Healthcare and Temple Health, Leveraging Technology and Analytics to Optimize Workforce Costs. In this discussion, Leora Westbrook, AMN Healthcare’s President of Workforce Strategy & Optimization and Co-Host of Elevate Care and Mouhamad (Mo) Abbas, AMN Healthcare’s President of Vendor Management Solutions, and Kim Hanson, R.N. and Vice President and Chief Nursing Office Women and Families at Temple Health highlight the importance of data-driven decision-making, vendor neutrality, and change management in achieving successful outcomes
In this episode, Kerry recaps the recent webinar between AMN Healthcare and Temple Health, Leveraging Technology and Analytics to Optimize Workforce Costs. In this discussion, Leora Westbrook, AMN Healthcare’s President of Workforce Strategy & Optimization and Co-Host of Elevate Care and Mouhamad (Mo) Abbas, AMN Healthcare’s President of Vendor Management Solutions, and Kim Hanson, R.N. and Vice President and Chief Nursing Office Women and Families at Temple Health highlight the importance of data-driven decision-making, vendor neutrality, and change management in achieving successful outcomes
Learn more about the webinar: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/amn-insights/managed-services-programs/blog/how-technology-and-analytics-drive-workforce-cost-efficiency/
Learn more about the show: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/campaign/elevate-care-podcast/
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction and Overview
02:47 Temple Workforce Landscape
05:35 The Power of Data-Driven Decision-Making
10:29 Vendor Neutrality in Workforce Management
11:14 Change Management in Implementing New Systems
13:10 Technology and Analytics for Staffing Efficiency
14:06 Adapting Strategies and Future Plans
About Kerry:
Kerry Perez hosts the Elevate Care Podcast, dedicated to driving innovation in workforce technology, total talent management, and workforce staffing needs.
As the Vice President, Enterprise Strategy at AMN Healthcare, Kerry Perez leads the design and implementation of enterprise strategies to fuel growth and achieve market leadership.
With over 15 years of experience in various healthcare roles at AMN, including recruitment, marketing, innovation, strategy, and mergers and acquisitions, Kerry established AMN's Diligence and Integration Management Office in her previous role. There, she oversaw the strategic and functional integration of new acquisitions to enhance value.
Guided by principles of customer obsession, ambitious thinking, and tangible results, Kerry's personal and professional mantra is "Be a Somebody who Makes Everybody Feel Like a Somebody." Committed to mentoring emerging leaders and building high-performing teams, Kerry holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in Business Economics and Communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
About Kim:
Kimberly Hanson is a seasoned healthcare professional with extensive experience in nursing leadership and clinical operations. Currently serving as the Vice President, Chief Nursing Officer Women and Families at Temple Health, she has been instrumental in driving the organization’s strategic goals within the workforce ecosystem, while ensuring the highest standards of patient care. With over two decades of experience in the healthcare industry, Kimberly has demonstrated expertise in inpatient care, patient satisfaction, strategic communications and technology integrations. Her strategic planning skills have been pivotal in guiding the organization through various healthcare challenges.
Prior to her current role, Kimberly held positions at AtlantiCare and Shore Medical Center, where she consistently achieved high levels of patient satisfaction and provided exceptional leadership in healthcare management. Her experience in labor and delivery, coupled with her proficiency in EMR systems, has contributed to her well-rounded skill set. Kim is a board-certified nurse and holds, holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Rowan University and a master’s degree in healthcare administration from LSU Shreveport.
About Leora:
Leora Westbrook is the President of Workforce Strategy and Optimization at AMN Healthcare, leading the team at Avantas, and overseeing strategy, technology and analytics solutions and consulting offerings.
Leora has more than 20 years of healthcare services experience. She has a proven track record in leading growth, program management, and delivering client results. She is known for managing complex programs, business development and her collaborative working style. She has worked for Fortune 100 companies, led her own client consulting business and was most recently the COO of healthcare startup OFFOR Health.
Leora earned an MBA from Nova Southeastern University and a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Miami.
About Mo:
Mouhamad “Mo” Abbas, joined as President of Vendor Management Systems (VMS) in 2022 . In this role, he has responsibility for all AMN’s VMS solutions (ShiftWise Flex, Medefis and b4Health).
Mr. Abbas joined AMN with over 20 years of experience in global talent management and as a SaaS and technology entrepreneur. He believes in making an impact to society by having an exceptional vision beyond the VMS in services and value delivery. He has a proven track record delivering state-of-the-art VMS solutions and has successfully implemented talent solutions and change management with several multi-industry global companies with various technologies.
Mr. Abbas most recently served as the Chief of Operations and Technology Innovations for Simplify Workforce, which he helped co-found. During his tenure there, he developed and drove market strategies, created a scalable model, and led marketing and sales, and implementation to multiple cross-industry clients, while also leading product innovation.
Mr. Abbas earned his MBA degree in MIS from St Edwards University, Austin, TX.
About The Show:
Elevate Care delves into the latest trends, thinking, and best practices shaping the landscape of healthcare. From total talent management to solutions and strategies to expand the reach of care, we discuss methods to enable high quality, flexible workforce and care delivery. We will discuss the latest advancements in technology, the impact of emerging models and settings, physical and virtual, and address strategies to identify and obtain an optimal workforce mix. Tune in to gain valuable insights from thought leaders focused on improving healthcare quality, workforce well-being, and patient outcomes.
Learn more about the show: https://www.amnhealthcare.com/campaign/elevate-care-podcast/
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Welcome to Elevate Care. I'm your host, Kerry Perez. Last week, we had a fascinating conversation with Mo. We were talking about workforce solutions and innovative technologies, and we're excited to keep that theme today, hearing from Kim Hansen from Temple Health. But in a bit of a switch, we're going to do a different format and showing you highlights from a recent webinar that was hosted by AMN Healthcare and ASHRA. Leading this conversation is going to be my co-host, Leora, also accompanied by Mo. So sit back and enjoy. Before we get started, I'd like to take just a moment for the team on this call to introduce themselves. I'll start. Hello, Leora Westbrook. I'm the leader and president of Workforce Strategy and Optimization at AMN Healthcare. I have the privilege of working alongside these esteemed colleagues. and oversee strategy, technology and analytics, solutions and consulting operates. With that, I'll pass it to Mo. Thank you, Leora. , good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mo Abbas. I lead the vendor management solutions at AMN Healthcare, part of Workforce Technology Solutions. And I have responsibility over all of AMN's VMS solutions. There are three of them, ShiftWise, Flex. Medefis and B4Health. Thank you very much for listening today and pass it over to Kim. Hi everybody, my name's Kim Hansen and I am one of the vice president of nursing and chief nursing officer for our women and families hospital here at Temple Health. We are currently a six operating hospital health system with the sixth one being our women's and families hospital that will be opening in the next year. We have a current 979 licensed beds across the health system. We do approximately 35,000 admissions a year. And we have a very, a huge volume of emergency room visits as well as outpatient visits. We are located in North Philadelphia and our mission has always been to provide access of the highest quality to our community. We live in a, well, we are in an area where most of our population is underserved. And so we value our mission and we live it every day. Making sure that we are efficient with our workforce is very important to us. So we were very excited to enter into this partnership as we will talk about shortly. All right, so I'll take it from there. What I wanted to do in this slide is really give just an outlook of the Temple Workforce landscape. The AMN Healthcare Partnership built a foundation of data guidance and utilization to relocate and balance the workforce, really helping Temple with a comprehensive workforce strategy approach. AMN was able actually to assist in significantly decreasing agency costs and saving over $3 million since 2021. Despite an increase in patient demand, Temple has been able to maintain a steady fill rate at about 92%, which is actually higher than the regional average in the high 80s. Also, healthy fill rates were achieved by deploying two key strategies. Number one, increasing the core FTEs and the float pool FTEs. which has lower cost than the staffing agency cost. Number two, strategically prioritizing agency by utilizing data and maximizing their flexibility in the float pool. Data-driven staffing tools allowed for an enterprise transparency, accountability, and empowerment for nurses to advocate for themselves in the decision-making. Increasing that really led to a couple of things. Increasing staff retention rate. Information and reporting dashboard really allowed for Temple leadership to have the really the necessary information to support the ongoing decision-making. After achieving an agency bill rate of about 18% below national average, which is actually a great achievement, we started actually shifting a little bit of focus back to increase the agency utilization to limit the overall spend on the core staff over time. One of the key success factors with the Temple program is really having all of the right components to manage a true comprehensive talent solution program. And that's basically a combination of technology and the processes around it. Running a vendor neutral program on a VMS tech platform was very effective. But then on the top of that, this is where you have the workforce optimization solution combination with a smart smear technology providing predictive scheduling. Then finally, the RPO solution, which is really an acronym for Recruiting Process Outsourcing, really helped build the core staff FTEs that really complemented an overall strategy approach for Temple. Thanks, Mo. That was a great overview. And I'd share just to take a step back to go forward that the foundation of the approach and partnership has been our healthcare enterprise labor management home and the ability to produce those accurate predictions of need while leveraging the analytics that provide the prescriptive guidance. So leveraging Temple's data along with the guidance to deliver the intelligence, we are able to uncover what opportunities Temple should prioritize in partnership with them and deploy those to their workforce. And so the workforce analytics give Temple that consolidated view of both core and contingency with the ability to drill down and see trends over time. That helps to explore patterns, determine root causes and lean those actionable insights. And in addition to those analytics, The integrated scheduling solution, SmartSquare, is the only healthcare scheduling software that combines the demand forecasting with the robust scheduling functionality. So again, pulling to that enterprise transparency, coupled with the business intelligence tools in one application. I'll share that the SmartSquare scheduling tool is a SaaS platform. So it... is a faster implementation, there's no versions to manage, and Temple receives those enhancements on a continual basis at no additional cost. We update weekly and the predictions pass through the staffing matrices for each unit and service area. This allows us to clearly identify the predicted demand versus supply. And the technology is able to forecast Temple's patient demand, allowing for the proactive alignment of their staffing resources to start up to 120 days before the shift. So results showed that predictions made 60 days out are within one staff that was needed 96% of the time. And that improves as we get closer to the shift. So at the 30-day out mark, the SmartSquare OpenShift technology starts to come into play. This is a patented sliding incentive scale that offers the highest incentives 30 days before the shift, and those incentives automatically decrease as the staff picks up shifts. So as a result, on average, we see 75 percent or more of OpenShift's filled. more than two weeks before the shift, and the incentive ranges that are set by the organization are filled sooner and also importantly, in line with the budget. And so leveraging this integrated predictive staffing solution, this is a key tool to automate your workforce plan coupled with the analytics that enable real-time decision-making and strategy pivots as needed. I love this slide because it's a great overview. While it doesn't tell the whole story, it really shows how Temple has leaned in to achieve the flexibility and outcomes that we share here today. And in doing so, proactively managing, predicting their staffing. they're able to remain competitive in the market in a highly competitive space, but still see reduced overall bill rates, still be able to strategically manage their load pools and their other dynamic staffing models. I would just iterate that no two client partners are the same. And as Kim shared, and I'm sure she'd be happy to elaborate, sending you up here, Kim, that this has been a journey and the strategy changes as the needs of the organization and the community around it change. And so that ability to leverage the tools to enable that and really be able to track that progress over time has been key for Temple to see that $12 million savings since our partnership in 2021. Unlock agility in your workforce management with ShiftWise Flex, allowing you to seamlessly stand up and manage internal resource and float pools. Visit ShiftWise.com to elevate efficiency in your healthcare operations. So with that, I will pivot us over to some Q&A. I see we've got a number of questions here, and please do keep the questions coming. If we cannot get to all questions, we will certainly plan to follow up directly, and with that, I'll pass it to Mel. Sounds good, thank you. Let me just take a look quickly here. So a couple of questions here. And Kim, you know, that's actually a good question. What was the change management strategy and how was it implemented? Meaning, how do you manage the changes as these new systems are implemented and processed? So for us, this was a complete organizational change. We started our journey with the initial workforce analysis, right? So we had... you know, we supplied data, we worked together to try and figure out where we were and where we wanted to be. After the analysis was done, we looked at the data. We had a lot to change, right? So we started small in the beginning, but all of these things, and like you said, we've been in partnership, we've been, you know, working together since 2021. So it hasn't been a huge amount of time, but in that time, we've changed a lot. Our first order of business was to create a resource management center, the RMC, and provide staffing resources in that location so that they were able to manage the systems and deploy staff as needed. That was a huge change. So we had to get everybody on board with trusting what was going to happen. And, you know, for some healthcare leaders, they're very, they like to manage their own areas, their own way and keep their hands on it so that they know that they're doing what needs to be done for the unit. We were actually turning over control into the SmartScore system and into the RMC and that was a huge change. I think what helped us is seeing the results and constant communication about where we were and what was happening. Having a lot of interactions with the team from AMN as well as internally helped us keep that transparency going so that we were able to adjust and pivot if needed. It was a complete overhaul of how we do things. And here we are two and a half years later and there's very little concerns with what we've done. And where, you know, actually we have shown and I mean, all the data supports it is that our fill rates and our staffing, you know, we're staffed appropriately. That was the biggest challenge. That how is this system going to predict what we need? I know I need X number of nurses for Saturday night. And that just leaning and trusting the system was very difficult, but we kept doing it. And from there, there is never concern anymore, truthfully. That's great, that's great. Kim, another one for you. How has Temple Health changed its strategies over the course of this partnership, meaning how are the AMN healthcare solutions, mobilizing that change, if you can just give us a little bit of insight on that. Yeah, sure. So we also went into this partnership in the middle of COVID, right? So everybody is scrambling to get staff and agency levels were like, the rates were at the highest and the ability to get staff was just becoming increasingly difficult. Here we are in a large city. We were caring for the most amount of COVID patients at the time, we were all confused and didn't know how to handle it. But when we went into this partnership, we were like, help us get staff, however, by whatever means. And the VMS team took that and said, here we are in the market, if you raise your rates here, if you need specialty here, do that, let's see what that gets us. And at that point, we were looking at people. resources. We needed the people here to help us take care of the patients. So that was working for us at the time. But over time, and as our resources became more available and our staff, you know, we were starting to get people permanent replacements. The BMS team also looked at that as well and said, okay, time to start dropping these rates. Now let's look at how we can get more permanent people in here. So we went from And this is just an example of how we've switched, how we were using your services. We went from highest rates that we needed to get people into, dropping the rates and continuing to look at that. And at the same time, recruiting for permanent positions. And now we're kind of going backwards because we also utilize the open shift. We started creating incentive shifts, but realize at some point that our incentive shifts were higher than our agency rates, so now we're rebalancing. Another example that was suggested was when we had agency, they were placed in separate units. So again, that controlling, like we need to manage our own people. But what we found was there were some units that had more agency utilization than the ones that had a higher... a higher vacancy rate. So we needed to like move everybody. So the suggestion from our partners at AMM was that move all of your agency into the float pool, right? So they were deployable to who needed them. That was allowing us to become more efficient with the agency workers that we had instead of paying for more here and here. They saw an opportunity that we were able to put them all in one area and deploy them as needed. So we did that and that has been how we've handled our agency for the past year and a half now, and that's worked out very, very well. That's great, that's great Kim. I have another really good question just also just came in the chat here. I think it's related to more like planning but change management. It's basically was asking, was there a cross section of stakeholders from throughout the health system? on the planning team? So that is one of the things that, you know, that maybe we could have done a little bit better. I think because the services were brought to the organization from our nurse leader, our nurse executive, I think people saw it as sort of a nursing thing. But in hindsight, when we've had our quarterly business reviews and all of that great information comes out and we're very excited about it, we... do like to include all of our executive leadership. And from those quarterly business reviews, I think that our executive team realizes that this could have been, we could have been a little bit better at planning in the beginning. So we could have had them a little bit more engaged and really making sure that they understood that this was not just a nursing staffing tool. Yes, the nursing. team, especially a temple is the biggest group of employees. However, it's so much more than that. It's so useful for finance to understand and HR. And while we did have stakeholders from HR at the table, obviously from finance, but supply chain, right? So like, how do we use these for like other areas of the hospital? I think that is very important. And we may have, we could have done a little bit better a more robust executive leadership from the beginning and in the planning stages. This is great. And to your point, a lot of change, big initiatives, and there's always some great lessons learned, right? So that everybody can benefit from. So thank you. Another question here is, can you speak a little bit to the importance of just the approach of vendor neutrality? that you managed in your hiring for your contingent workforce? Sure. I think it took, it put us in control a little bit, right? So we weren't working towards one company and like that was the only game in town. We had a blank slate and people were kind of, or at least I feel like we were able to cast a wide net to everybody that was out there. and really get the right people in here. I think that it kept us out of that feeling obligated to use one service because we've used them forever. It really took that away from our needs. We let everybody know what we needed and then you guys worked your magic and got us within the prices, the rates and the people and the needs and everything just kind of lined up. it took that burden off of us as an organization working with individual companies that we were just working through you and we didn't have to worry about that. That's great. That's great. And then one last question, and maybe after I ask, we'll see if there's any more questions coming in. You obviously have done a lot in a very short period of time. In a change that's very up and down, it's like in a time that's very, change is not easy. What's next for Temple Health? Lots. So, I think we're still working on right sizing our staff. That's always important. It's always ever changing and just keeping ahead of what our needs are. Right now we're opening a new hospital. So using the services and putting an implementation plan in for that will be really important in the coming months. looking at ways of optimizing the data that we already have access to. So it's something that we didn't talk about was there are dashboards for leaders to go in and look at their own information and just utilizing that on a day-to-day basis, like maybe for incidental over time. So now we've right-sized our staff, like now let's try to optimize and be financially responsible with, you know, who we have and what we're doing. So looking at different things, turnover rates, like which units have a higher turnover rate and how can we like fix that so that we're not adding additional costs for orientation, unnecessarily if we can try and just focus on the areas that need it. So I think optimizing now is really where we are. This is great and exciting and we're excited to kind of drive this journey with you, Kim. moving forward. Just underscore again, the nature of the partnership and the trust, transparency and collaboration. Those elements were fundamental for Temple to make the transformative changes that they have made and continue to make. And so we just really appreciate the opportunity. to partner and continue to do so. And I am just so excited for where Temple is headed next. I really do enjoy sitting across from you, him, and your cross-functional team members in our quarterly business reviews and other sessions. I mean, we have finance and operations and clinical and HR, and it's so great to review the data and assess progress and then discuss as a team. where we see opportunity and stack hands on where we want to go next. Because there was always something more that we can do together in that continuous improvement and innovation space. So thank you, and in Temple Health for being the true partners that you are. We appreciate it so very much and sharing your partnership just as much. And thank you guys for inviting me to, to highlight how, you know, how we come along. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today on Elevate Care. If you found this episode valuable, please consider sharing it with a colleague and subscribing to our show on your favorite podcast platform. You can learn more about this episode and our show on our website at amnhelfcare.com and follow us on social media to stay updated on new episodes and the ever-changing world of healthcare.