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Company Announcement

New Productivity Enhancements for ED Staff Scheduling

Morrisville, N.C. May 2, 2017 – ShiftWizard today announced that it has added new productivity enhancements to its industry leading healthcare workforce optimization solution. While some of these enhancements were designed to meet the staffing needs of Emergency Departments, others benefit inpatient staffing as well.

Hospitals have long struggled to determine and maintain the optimal nurse staffing levels to avoid complications and improve patient outcomes, but the pressure to achieve that somewhat elusive goal increased significantly in 2013 when reimbursement became more closely tied to performance on various care measures, as part of the Affordable Care Act.

For years, ShiftWizard’s staff scheduling and productivity management tools have helped hospitals address these challenges, providing them with concrete measures of staffing levels to fine-tune performance, set quality improvement goals and monitor overall productivity. The latest enhancements to the company’s workforce management solution make that task even easier for hospitals as a whole, but for Emergency Departments in particular. ShiftWizard now provides the ability to measure additional key productivity metrics including Hours Per Patient Per Visit (HPPV) and Hours Per Patient Per Day (HPPD), in real-time.

Ed Keating, Interim manager of the Emergency Department at WakeMed North Family Health & Women’s Hospital and former Nursing Manager at WakeMed Children’s Emergency Department, understands the importance of these metrics all too well. He has relied on ShiftWizard’s staff scheduling and productivity capabilities for several years, but has continued to use an Excel spreadsheet to track HPPV on a daily basis. Keating actually worked closely with ShiftWizard on the development of these enhancements to ensure they would meet the needs of Emergency Departments much like his.

“This new ShiftWizard feature makes it much easier for nursing managers to respond to patient volume in real time. If it’s a slow day, we can determine that it makes sense to send some staff home or ask other staff to come in late. ShiftWizard ensures that those hours automatically come out of my staffing total, so I quickly know if I have met my HPPV target,” explained Keating.

While measuring HPPV is a key metric for Emergency Departments, measuring HPPD is key for their inpatient counterparts. ShiftWizard now makes that process easier as well, allowing charge nurses to easily adjust staffing based on patient volume.

“In addition to making things easier for me and my nursing counterparts, these new features give nursing leaders and hospital administrators a more complete view of overall staffing productivity,” added Keating. “It also lets my charge nurses understand that our goal is using the available information to manage staffing levels to ensure we have the right number of staff for the situation, not just reducing staff.”

“This is a perfect example of how ShiftWizard is committed to meeting our customers’ needs, and how we work directly with our customers as part of our product development process to accomplish that,” said Christian Pardue, co-founder, ShiftWizard. “Shane and I both worked in Emergency Departments, and know how stressful those environments can be. We are excited to remove at least some of that stress, by making workforce management easier for them and other nursing departments.”

ShiftWizard, developed by nurses for healthcare organizations, provides advanced workforce optimization for both direct-patient and non-direct patient healthcare personnel with staff scheduling, productivity management, predictive analytics, communication tools and more.

The company’s solution is ideally suited to meet the workforce management needs of healthcare organizations, including:

  • Acute care hospitals
  • Long-term care facilities
  • Long-term acute care (LTAC)
  • Outpatient clinics (e.g., surgical centers, urgent care clinics)
  • Critical access hospitals
  • Correctional healthcare facilities
  • Mental health facilities
  • Military/veteran hospitals and clinics

About ShiftWizard

With more than 50 years of combined nursing experience and more than 24 years of direct patient care experience, ShiftWizard founders Shane Parker, RN, and Christian Pardue, RN, set out to create a solution to address the scheduling challenges and frustrations they directly experienced throughout their careers. They were industry pioneers, introducing the first 100 percent web-based scheduling solution for the healthcare industry in 2007.

They have since expanded the solution’s workforce optimization capabilities to include scheduling, staff communications, productivity management, enterprise-wide workforce optimization and predictive analytics. ShiftWizard has grown its customer base to more than 100,000 users today. Their dedication to developing innovative technology and delivering unmatched customer service has paid off, earning them a nearly 100 percent customer retention rate and 98 percent customer support satisfaction rate.

For more information, visit www.shiftwizard.com.