Why Acuity-Based Staffing?
The ability to achieve an optimum balance between cost, quality and safety is key to a healthcare organization’s financial viability; and a major factor in this balance is nurse staffing to meet patient acuity.
The 5 Rights of Staffing
The 5 Rights of Staffing are critical to achieving an optimum balance:
The Link between Acuity-based Staffing, Continuity of Care and Patient Outcomes: Why is This Important?
You could have two same aged, equally ill patients on the same unit—Patient Alvez has a doting family and just wants to get home. Patient Bartlett is lonely, and enjoys the company.
While each patient will receive the same great care, one will need more of the nurse’s time than the other. Further, we must consider the relationship aspect. What will it do to these patients if Nurse Ryan sees them one day and Nurse Abby comes in the next day?
First, there’s knowledge transfer: Nurse Abby will have to familiarize herself with each patient’s condition—information Nurse Ryan already has.
The Joint Commission estimates that 80% of serious medical errors involve miscommunication between caregivers during the transfer of patients.
Second, each patient will repeat introductory conversations in an effort to get to know and trust this new nurse.
This will take more of Nurse Abby’s time than otherwise needed, but if not done, the number of nurse calls may increase, interrupting workflow and time with patients downstream.
Third, the patients may experience a sense of loss or a feeling of unimportance when Nurse Ryan doesn’t come back—especially Patient Bartlett who values the rapport they’d developed.
This may spur patients to ill-advised and unwise thoughts of independence, and putting patients at an increased risk of patient falls.
How might these scenarios impact patient outcomes? We can’t know. But, we do know that Continuity of Care has a significant impact on patient outcomes. AcuityPlus takes Continuity of Care into consideration when creating staffing assignments.
The 5 Rights of Staffing
Most U.S. hospitals have hundreds of nurses, some have thousands. Saving just 10% in typical overtime expenditures saves hundreds of thousands of dollars. A 250-bed hospital can save approximately a half million dollars each year.
AcuityPlus will optimize staff assignments, resulting in reduced unplanned overtime, minimized use of staff agencies, and staffing that is matched to your team’s actual workload.
Using AcuityPlus has shown to improve staff satisfaction, length of stay, and bed management, all impacting patient care, patient satisfaction, outcomes, and cost.
Let us walk you through the specifics of your facilities, with a return on investment model. We will use your data, describe where the savings come from, and let you be the judge. The return on your investment using AcuityPlus will be in the millions of dollars.
