KRONOS Workforce Solutions for Healthcare

Sandhya Mishra takes a deep dive into workforce solutions in healthcare industry that offers real-time insights, and visibility empowering employees to boost efficiencies, improve productivity, and deliver better patient experience.

It’s clearly not an easy task to appreciate requests of time-off thus rescheduling the combinations of duty periods and care-givers as per the patient needs, along with making sure that each staff works the correct number of hours.

Healthcare professionals face complex challenges to meet the rising demand of patients, working in understaffed units with minimal supplies available to give efficient care which in turn contributes to stress. The findings from the very popular study when extrapolated into an overarching model, proposed that overworked staff become burnt-out, which eventually lead to depression. Thus burnout and depression manifest itself through fatigue, irritability and reduced cognitive functioning, all of which puts pressure on team relationships causing a poorer safety climate, and on their own individual work performance, resulting in more distanced staff, poorer quality of care and ultimately a higher risk of making errors.

We need to be concerned about our doctors and nurses who are administering care to patients, since well-being and burnout are associated with patient safety. One great way to do this is to give them more influence over their work schedules thus making a way for healthy employee engagement.

This way of creating an employee engagement not only empowers the staff to prepare their own scheduling process but also relives the managers from constantly shuffling the rota to balance the workload and unknown personal schedules.

Sumeet Doshi, Senior Director of Sales  and Country Manager, India, Kronos, says, “Workforce management has undergone a great degree of change but technology has been at the heart of this disruption. With the current challenges of the sector, healthcare providing behemoths will now require automated scheduling and staffing capabilities to improve the quality of healthcare offered.

Addressing these issues, Kronos Workforce Central drives employee work life integration by enabling the staff to opt for preferred schedules, request shift swapping and time off intimations, thereby preventing employee burnout. Keeping in mind the significance of remote working, the solution is available on personal gadgets which helps employees and managers access self-service, submit requests, and manage approvals from any location at any time. With Workforce Central deployed across locations in India, it will enable real time visibility and actionable insights that will help clients make informed staffing decisions.” 

Kronos is a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, its workforce applications are purpose-built for businesses, healthcare providers, educational institutions, and government agencies of all sizes.

Many hospitals are now gradually adopting the automated workforce management solutions Apollo Hospitals Group being one of them. It has selected an innovative workforce management solution from Kronos to boost workforce efficiencies, and productivity.

The innovative solution from Kronos Incorporated, has gone live across Apollo’s six locations in South India, empowering its 3,000 workforce, with real-time visibility, and actionable insights, yielding quality care. Collaborative self-scheduling allows hospital staff to select their preferred schedules and make it easier to swap shifts and request time off, offering a more engaging experience that simplifies their work-life balance. These features will be extended to 15 more locations, covering about 8,000 employees during the next month. 

Given the criticality of healthcare operations and the importance of accurate staffing to meet patient’s demand, the intuitive solution helps auto generate rosters and enables the nurses and other healthcare staff deliver better care. Ensuring right availability of key staff in critical functions to meet the patient needs, the new system also helps employees and managers take the right decisions, in the moment, for better outcomes. This also enables fairness and equity in policy administration and ensuring compliance management. 

Studies indicate that patient experience and workforce engagement are intertwined. Hospitals that boost patient experience or employee engagement see improvement in patients’ ratings of their care. Besides, there is a compounding effect when hospitals improve in both superior patient experiences and engagement measures. Optimal engagement is also linked to enhanced employee satisfaction, quality care and financial returns. 

Dr. Hariprasad, Group president, Apollo Hospitals Group, says, “We are committed to investing in transformational innovations that empower our dedicated staff with greater, visibility to maximize their potential, meet unpredictable demands and deliver superior care. Our focus on talent, technology and transformation is aimed at offering better care for our staff, patients, society and the nation, while also making our processes more efficient. An integral part of this mission is ensuring right employee in the right place at the right time, fully engaged and empowered to manage their work better with timely interventions. We believe the Kronos data-driven platform will help us drive transparency and equity across our workforce and, further motivate our employees to provide patients with optimal care.” 

It enables hospital staff to access information on the device of their choice, providing engaging user experience across phones, mobile app, tablets, and desktops. Employees and managers will have access to self-service, submit requests, and manage approvals anytime and anywhere. The solution also provides options to mark attendance on a smartphone for employees on the move across locations.  Apart from this, it will now also allow the hospital to centralize and streamline payroll input process across 22 locations in India, with automation of complex rules across different states and employee groups – freeing up the payroll team to handle larger volumes of transactions with minimal manual interventions. 

For the management at Apollo Hospitals, the solution will enable real-time visibility and actionable insights via Workforce Central to help them make more informed staffing decisions. This will empower managers and employees to make more informed decisions, in the moment for better outcomes – and in turn will result in a better experience for their patients. 

As discussed, such automated systems can effortlessly help the organization in cutting costs while also providing maximum productivity, however, it is also evident from the past experiences that over the time their utilization and execution falls through rendering the innovations obsolete. This can be overcome by constant training and motivation to produce the best known result.