Challenge: The client had the vision and the healthcare industry staffing experience; it needed a development partner with analytics and healthcare product development experience. Healthcare staffing is a complex function with many moving parts. Patient demand fluctuates hour by hour, day by day, and season to season; the workforce behaves differently in varied economic environments; employees have unpredictable requests for time off; and union contracts and hospital rules must be taken into account. Increasingly, state laws mandate health provider staffing ratios. The Optimé Group envisioned to build a staffing and optimization solution that incorporated all of these variables and needed a technology peer who could proactively contribute to their design, ideation and development process using cutting edge terchnologies.
Solution: SSI developed a cloud-based staffing and optimization solution employing Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a scalable model given its track record of performance, innovation and flexibility.
The software solution integrated disparate data, applied statistical rigor and delivered predictive utilization models. The solution enabled the management to plan their annual strategy ahead of time including budgets, care models, productivity and daily staffing etc. The predictive algorithms, combined with detailed information and analytics on demand and supply of the staff, feeds into an optimization engine resulting into a highly appropriated schedule. This collective information can be further displayed in a series of customizable and easy-to-use dashboards that inform and update day-to-day scheduling of nurses and other healthcare team members.
Additionally, SSI developed specific modules that address budgeting, staffing and vendor management. Lastly, an easy-to-use, remotely accessible web portal was deployed to enable nurses to better manage the balance in their work and personal life activities. The services utilized to develop the platform include Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and Amazon Route 53 etc.
Result: The Optimé Group was able to achieve a highly scalable, cost-effective and reliable solution which resulted into quantifiable results for its healthcare clients that include some of the largest healthcare systems. Optimé has reduced its clients’ variable staffing costs by 5% to 9% and increased staffing office productivity by 70%.
