TeamHealth Value Advantage: Solving ED Staffing Challenges

TeamHealth’s Online Staffing Optimization (OSO) solution helps administrators and service-line leaders capture and analyze data in real time and improve a hospital’s financial and operational performance and its commitment to clinical quality and patient safety.

Hospital emergency departments (EDs) face daily challenges in hiring and scheduling the right number of clinicians with the appropriate skill sets needed to meet patient demand. Labor costs are the largest component of a healthcare organizations’ expense budget, and staffing affects virtually every element of ED operations. An online optimization solution that uses an intuitive analytics platform supports healthcare organizations’ efforts to ensure that the right staff are in the right place at the right time to accommodate ED patients’ needs and to maximize ED operations and throughput objectives.

Evidence-Based Results and Process Improvement

TeamHealth recently deployed OSO at a hospital in the western U.S. to improve ED physicians’ productivity goals. By analyzing and implementing the OSO ED data to ensure scheduled staff had the needed skill sets, the hospital achieved improvements enabling them to increase ED physician compensation by $25 per hour.

Similarly, a four-hospital system in the southern U.S. faced staffing challenges caused by seasonal fluctuations and significant provider productivity constraints due to aggressive productivity targets. A facility medical director (FMD) used OSO to analyze his facility, and after reviewing the results of changes based on OSO recommendations, he expanded the evaluation to all the system’s EDs. Based on the OSO data and matching each hospital’s seasonal needs, the FMD optimized staffing at the four EDs by implementing three bottom-line neutral staffing models – winter, off-peak and summer. The approach smoothed staffing across all system hospitals and created optimum year-round staffing at the four hospitals.