Administrative Solutions
AI-powered software can help predict staffing needs, and much more
March 28, 2024
AI-driven technology can’t alone solve the current shortage of nurses in Canada and the United States, but it can contribute to alleviating the crisis through more efficient staffing and scheduling that gives frontline workers more control and nurtures a great place to work culture.
It can also provide data analysis capabilities that help leadership and front-line unit leaders find and address workforce trends by location, unit, or other parameters. Finally, it can support more effective, personalized communication through listening and collaboration tools and streamline many routine processes to free up HR resources so they can focus on targeted employee engagement, retention, and recruitment initiatives.
Even before COVID-19, forecasting models documented a shortage of 60,000 nurses in Canada by 2022 and more than 117,000 by 2030.
Due to sick leaves, unprecedented burnout, retirements, and the lure of higher-paying agency opportunities in the wake of the pandemic, hospitals and provincial governments face an even greater crisis.
In the U.S., where approximately 100,000 nurses left the profession during the pandemic and an estimated 600,000 reported an intent to leave the workforce by 2027, the situation is equally dire.
According to a survey completed by the American Nurses Foundation in 2022, 60 percent of nurses under the age of 25 and 57 percent of nurses between the ages of 25 to 34 do not believe their organization cares about their well-being and feel unsupported.
On March 4, 2024, Canada’s Minister of Health and Canada’s Chief Nursing Officer announced the release of the Nursing Retention Toolkit: Improving the Working Lives of Nurses in Canada to help improve the working lives of nurses.
As a resource created by nurses and for nurses, the toolkit is the result of a collaborative effort with the nursing community. The toolkit focuses on eight core themes with corresponding initiatives that nursing employers can implement to help improve retention – flexible and balanced ways of working; organizational mental health and wellness supports; professional development and mentorship; reduced administrative burden; strong management and communication; clinical governance and infrastructure; inspired leadership; and safe staffing practices.
Several initiatives relating to these themes can be supported by AI-driven people management software.
Hunterdon Health: combining culture and technology
Hunterdon Health of Flemington, New Jersey, is one of the most recent healthcare systems to upgrade to UKG Pro, an AI-powered human capital management platform.
Offered by UKG, a technology company created from the merger of Ultimate Software and Kronos Inc. in October 2020, UKG Pro encompasses a wide assortment of capabilities, including core HR, payroll, advanced scheduling, timekeeping, benefits management, surveys, employee recruitment and development tools, and collaboration tools.
AI capabilities are woven throughout the platform and accessed by UKG’s AI assistant, UKG Bryte. The entire platform is geared to helping organizations build a culture and environment that attracts and retains the best people.
A UKG customer for more than a decade and a Great Place To Work® certified™ healthcare system, Hunterdon Health upgraded to UKG Pro to support the needs of its workforce and to amplify its great place to work culture.
Hunterdon Health operates a full range of preventative, diagnostic, and therapeutic inpatient and outpatient community health services, including the 178-bed Hunterdon Medical Centre, and employs thousands of frontline workers.
“Historically, we’ve used multiple best-of-breed solutions, but we decided about a year ago that we need to be more platform-oriented and much more integrated from a technology perspective, like we already are from a clinical perspective,” said Edmund Siy, Hunterdon Health’s senior vice president and chief digital and information officer.
“Capabilities like shift-swapping and the ability to make in-the-moment staffing decisions by seeing where we are in greatest need of coverage are already making life so much easier for our people,” he added. “Our staff is only getting busier. They’re being asked to do more, and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to focus on their patients.”
He continued, “UKG Pro will help us be inclusive of all our employees, including those who may need more selective hours, want more flexibility, or don’t want to work full time. It will empower them with options that work best for them while helping us fill gaps and ensure proper patient coverage.”
A win for the organization and the staff
UKG’s AI algorithms provide organization-wide visibility into a hospital or health system’s available labour resources to generate fiscally appropriate, data-driven schedules based on anticipated patient volumes, employee preferences, and relevant skills, licenses and certifications.
The centralized, enterprise-wide staffing and scheduling capability reduces unnecessary overtime spend and the reliance on expensive agency nurses by making the most efficient use of a health system’s available workforce. Its real-time analytics dashboards help leaders gain valuable insights into trends and actions that need to be taken. It also frees unit leaders to focus on patient care.
“Fundamentally, UKG Pro, leveraging numerous data points, provides ways to understand typical scheduling patterns and use that to better inform our customers as simply and intuitively as possible about how they can plan for the staff that they have,” said Rahul Kamdar, UKG vice-president, product management. “This includes capabilities outside of traditional scheduling, including insights from patterns across the board that are then surfaced into AI-driven actionable recommendations for a health system’s schedulers.”
Using UKG Bryte, UKG Pro will also give frontline staff the convenience of expressing their own scheduling preferences.
“For example, there may be some employees who are looking for more opportunities to work,” explained Kamdar. “They may be more available to work in different locations. Bryte AI makes that possible without having to navigate a cumbersome process of communicating their interests using traditional means. It becomes an experience where employees are now in charge of opportunities aligned with their preferences.”
Using their UKG Pro app on their cellphones, nurses and other frontline staff can request a shift swap, which is automatically communicated to other employees in accordance with rules the employer has embedded in the software.
Potential swap candidates may be selected based on their work location, work patterns, preferences, and qualifications. If none of the preferred candidates are available, a last resort option is to scale out to a larger pool of employees and agencies.
The same process occurs when an employee can’t report to work because of a family emergency or sickness, prompting the system to go out and seek someone to fill in.
These mechanisms for filling last-minute staffing needs free organizations from the flurry of phone calls, voicemails, emails and texts that would otherwise be necessary to reach out to potential candidates.
Beyond workforce management
Beyond staffing, scheduling, payroll and timekeeping, UKG Pro offers a wide range of additional capabilities, including recruiting and onboarding, Employee Voice, learning management, a career designer and coaching support – all with built-in AI capability accessed via the UKG Bryte virtual assistant.
“Employee Voice allows for employee surveys that provide management with a mechanism for an ongoing, dynamic way to know how their organization is performing, and how their employees are doing,” said Kamdar.
Combining patient outcomes with staffing data
UKG Pro’s AI-driven platform positions its users to not only support organizations in managing all their people. Its unified platform and data structure opens the door to combining workforce data with EHR data, enabling it, for example, to correlate patient outcomes with staffing and scheduling data.
UKG solutions support more than 3,500 hospitals and health systems in the U.S. and more than 450 hospitals across Canada.
For more information, visit ukg.ca.