At last week’s 2016 Healthcare Workforce Summit, Avantas released a new survey report titled Predictive Analytics in Healthcare 2016: Optimizing Nurse Staffing in an Era of Workforce Shortages. Avantas is an AMN Healthcare Company, the nation’s leading innovator in healthcare workforce solutions, including staffing services.
The survey was intended to investigate why nurse scheduling and staffing are a widespread problem at hospitals and healthcare organizations across the country. According to the survey, one in four nurse managers still use paper-based scheduling tools or no tools at all. With nurse shortages becoming a chronic problem, healthcare providers need to better understand future patient demand in order to accurately plan scheduling and staffing in advance, a task that can be accomplished using predictive analytics.
Nurse managers, finance managers, and registered nurses were asked about scheduling and staffing challenges and potential solutions as part of the AMN Healthcare survey. Understaffing, last-minute schedule changes, assignment of non-nursing tasks, and lack of experienced and specialty staff were found to be common problems amongst nurse managers. When surveyed about the impact of these problems on hospital and healthcare facilities, three quarters of nurse managers reported being very concerned about staff morale, and almost 70% said they were very concerned about the impact on patient satisfaction.
Even though predictive analytics offer solutions to the scheduling and staffing problems reported by a majority of nurse managers, most don’t know that these solutions are available to them. 80 percent of nurse managers surveyed reported they were unaware of technology-enabled solutions to nurse scheduling and staffing problems.
Healthcare facilities where predictive analytics have already been adopted report positive outcomes including:
- 97% accurate predictions of staffing need 30 days out from the shift
- 75% of open shifts hours filled more than two weeks in advance
- Significant, measurable increases in RN staff satisfaction
- 4%-7% savings in overall labor spending, often totaling millions of dollars
The full Predictive Analytics in Healthcare 2016 survey, infographic, and video can be viewed here.
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