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case study

Creating the gig-economy for healthcare in a post-pandemic labor market.

Mercy Hospital Center

System details

  • 40,000+ employees
  • Acute Inpatient Discharges:
    166,470 Surgeries
    (Inpatient and Outpatient): 164,212

Mercy goals

  • Decrease Premium Spend
  • Drive Efficiencies
  • Find Quality Talent

Results

  • 11% Reduction in Premium Spend
  • 25% Reduction in Workforce Operations Headcount
  • 8% Increase in Incentive Shift Participation

Mercy partnered with Trusted to build an operating system for Mercy’s flexible workforce. The combined team first modernized Mercy’s procurement of long term agency labor by removing burdensome legacy processes, driving workflow automation and refocusing the user experience on a critical but often overlooked stakeholder - the clinical hiring manager. Mercy and Trusted have since expanded their partnership to develop intelligent shift management, laying the groundwork to programmatically fill open shifts with the right clinician at the right time, place and cost, regardless of source.

  • Optimized Operational Efficiency - Leveraging the Works platform, Mercy moved multi-step and multi-stakeholder candidate submittal review, change request approval and offer processes away from ad-hoc email chains to structured on-platform workflows, significantly reducing manual touchpoints to fill while enabling end-to-end reporting & analytics to manage supplier performance. The addition of event-triggered notifications with deep links for onboarding, compliance, timesheet management & dispute resolution further lowered the operational overhead necessary to maintain agency talent pools.
  • Increased Fill Rate - Automation of recruiting for Mercy’s incentive shift program via programmatic shift distribution enabled Mercy to better leverage internal talent pools, proactively increasing the fill rate for critical care needs, while significantly reducing the need for central staffing office and hiring manager involvement in manual, last-minute recruitment efforts.
  • Reduced Premium Spend - Using a proprietary dynamic shift pricing algorithm, Mercy was able to identify which available clinicians are interested in which shifts, load balance matches and selectively recruit to balance fill rate and spend. Doing so also allowed Mercy to incorporate external supply while mitigating the risk of agency overspend.
The pandemic taught us what I believe the frontline nurse has been screaming at us for years: They want flexibility. They want to be able to work when they want to work.

What were Mercy’s goals?

Decrease Premium Spend

Over-reliance on overtime & premium spend to fill shift gaps unnecessarily increased labor costs.

Drive Efficiencies

Existing procurement processes required ongoing manual interventions, distracting nursing management from patient care.

Find Quality Talent

Disparate data sets & fragmented systems deprived nursing management of real-time demand and supply (resource availability, cost, and qualification) signals necessary to find the right talent at the right time.

How did Trusted address these challenges?

Systemizing Talent

Enabled Mercy to create unified labor pools across both internal, and external resources to fill short-term gig and long term needs.

Capturing Demand

Develop methodology for facilities to express short-term and longer-term needs, single shift or blocks of shifts, to their unified pools of labor.

Predictive & Algorithmic Matching

Launched  dynamic labor mix optimization engine that matches open needs with the most qualified, cost-effective, interested, and available workers, while automating the distribution process in a seamless way across Mercy’s available pool of workers.

Intelligent Event Management

Realized significant operational efficiencies across compliance & onboarding, time & invoicing, and labor analytics by centralizing and orchestrating processes within Works.

How did Mercy partner with Trusted to address the problem?

Combining deep clinical and market expertise with modern technology, Trusted partnered directly with Mercy to build the future of work in healthcare.  Our objective was to develop a next-generation, end-to-end staffing platform that empowered Mercy to optimize its entire workforce in one environment.

Building on the foundational infrastructure that Mercy already possessed, the combined team implemented Works, the operating system for workforce management, to simplify and streamline budgeting, labor mix allocation, req creation, onboarding, compliance, and resource pool management. The resulting refactored platform enabled Trusted & Mercy to together shape and lay the foundation of a flexible, gig workforce.

Lessons from Mercy

“Works has supported our ability to meet this desire and to function in a dynamic way, moving talent around to meet our needs.  At the height of the pandemic, Works enabled us to flex our workforce from regions that were surging to ones that were not. Using data that was representative of the total workforce took the onus off of the individual frontline manager, even the individual hospital, and most importantly, allowed us to provide better patient care”

Betty Jo Rocchio

Senior Vice President,

Chief Nursing Officer

We not only use the product, but we have also invested in it as the catalyst to the future of Mercy.

“Most hospital systems are content to work with large known players in the healthcare space. Those that have done the same thing for decades. At Mercy, our leadership team is fully aware of the changes and challenges in the healthcare space and specifically the clinical workforce. Mercy tried different incentives and staffing models and never was able to optimize its staffing. Once we saw Works and the way it can leverage workforce pools, on-demand, data analytics, and intelligent software to manage clinical labor and optimize care delivery, we knew it was a partnership and a product we needed to have. We not only use the product, but we have also invested in it as the catalyst to the future of Mercy.”

woman in a sweater smiling in cafe

Beth Melgren

Clinical Operations

Ready to get started?

Works connects to the systems you already use, including biweekly payroll data, daily shift scheduling data, and more. Go to www.works.ai/works-demo to get in-touch or email us at sales@trustedhealth.com to get started in as little as two weeks.

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