Houston Healthcare + HWL
Streamline Temporary Staffing to Save Time and Reduce Spend
About Houston Healthcare
Serving 300,000 patients annually, Houston Healthcare, located in Warner Robins, GA, comprises seven different entities, including two fully accredited acute care hospitals with a combined capacity of 282 beds. Houston’s mission is to improve the healthcare of their communities by providing patient-focused, high-quality, cost-effective services while promoting health and wellness.
The Situation
In a busy hospital serving a large military community, no department can afford to be understaffed, so when a Nurse Manager for Houston Medical Center’s Med/Surg floor learns one of the staff nurses needs time off, they immediately pick up the phone to begin the process of hiring a temporary worker. The Nurse Manager notifies the hospital’s Workforce Management Analyst, who will contact each of the ten staffing agencies Houston works with to provide details about the vacancy.
And then the chaos begins. The calls and emails from agencies start flooding in. The Workforce Management Analyst fields questions from agency recruiters, reviews candidate applications, and passes them along. The Nurse Manager, busy with their primary duties, attempts to schedule calls with the most qualified candidates. If they speak to someone promising, they will inform the staffing contract to move forward with the placement, setting off the time-consuming process of negotiating rates and dates, signing a contract, and obtaining credentials.
The process is cumbersome but manageable–at least it would be if the hospital only had the occasional vacancy. However, on any given day, Houston Medical Center and Perry Hospital collectively have an average of 90 temporary nurses and allied staff on site. With each placement requiring 20-30 hours to arrange, they couldn’t meet the demand.
The process could have been more efficient, but the problem had broader implications. The hospitals were at the mercy of their vendors. Contracts were inconsistent, rates were not always competitive, and cancellation policies protected the agencies and contractors–never the hospital.
They knew something had to change, but a previous attempt to streamline the process had failed. The team at Houston was rightfully hesitant to seek out another solution.
Key Challenges
Inefficient process for sourcing and credentialing temporary nurses and allied staff
Managers spending hours fielding calls, emails, and faxes from staffing agencies
Subject to agency contracts and paying varying rates
Taking weeks to gather credentials for each contractor
Reconciling timecards with vendor invoices a time consuming process
“I cannot say enough about the HWL team. From our Implementation Specialist to our Account Manager, to the Director – I am confident HWL has our best interest in mind.”
– Minnie Webling, Workforce Management Analyst at Houston Healthcare
The Goal
Improve efficiency of the temporary staffing process to save time and reduce spend.
The Solution
Though Houston wasn’t actively seeking a solution, the solution found them. As the MSP for the State of Georgia’s COVID-19 Surge Staffing Program, HWL worked closely with the Workforce Management team at Houston. The team could see firsthand the efficiency and neutrality HWL brought to the temporary staffing process. In speaking with the HWL Account Manager about their other staffing challenges, it became apparent that the solution Houston needed was right in front of them.
In August 2021, HWL partnered with Houston to implement a customized Vendor Neutral MSP technology to deliver a streamlined temporary staffing process. The VMS would give management and vendors a single point of contact to communicate vacancies, submit candidates, sign contracts, manage credentialing, and approve timekeeping and invoices. The MSP implementation was deployed in less than thirty days- -usually a three to six-month process for agency-led MSP programs.
“The speed and efficiency of implementation was unparalleled to any other. Houston’s leadership team needed to focus all their efforts on caring for patients and their staff, as Omicron was at its height. HWL committed to getting Houston up and running as soon as possible. Our team was on site several times during the first few months, working collaboratively with Houston management. We could move as quickly as we did, partly because they were so motivated to start the new process.”
– Lori Kiesel, Vice President of Business Development at HWL
The Results
Significant Time Savings
Eliminated time wasted on back-and-forth negotiations, chasing down credentials, and reconciling invoices with ten different vendors
Reduce Time-to-Fill and Time-to-Start
Candidates often submit within a few hours of posting
Offer to onboard in less than one week with credentialing and pre-employment paperwork completed through the VMS.
Improve Fill Rate
With 56 vendors competing to fill vacancies, each requisition receives an average of 4-7 qualified candidates, resulting in a 100% fill rate.
Significant Cost Savings
27% reduction in average monthly temporary staffing spend due to more competitive rates, eliminating hidden agency fees, and having travelers complete paperwork before the start date.
Webling knew after that first training session that the new system would be beneficial. She would soon discover exactly how much of a game changer HWL would be.
The solution went live in September of 2021 and Houston immediately saw the benefit as they scrambled to fill vacancies created by the Delta variant of COVID-19.
“The new process took so much off of their plates during a time when everyone was especially overloaded,” Kiesel says. “Correcting the inefficiencies continues to put more hours back in everyone’s day.”
The department managers are certainly appreciative of the time saved, but perhaps no one feels it more than Webling. On invoicing alone, Webling used to spend three hours reconciling each invoice from ten different vendors, which accounted for approximately 30 hours. She now spends less than one hour on a single consolidated invoice from HWL.
Similarly, Webling says prior to partnering with HWL, it could take several weeks to chase down missing credentials for individual contractors. Now, that responsibility is on the agency to upload documents to the VMS. From there, an HWL compliance specialist does the heavy lifting of monitoring, and ensuring missing items are provided before the scheduled start date.