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In The News

Concerro Adds Labor Analysis Tools from WRx

Posted on: June 24th, 2011 at 4:30 pm EST

Concerro Adds Labor Analysis Tools from
Workforce Prescriptions

Labor Utilization Audit™ and Hospital Pay IQ® Reports Provide Objective Analysis of Labor Efficiency

San Diego, Calif. -- June 28th, 2011 -- Concerro, Inc., the market leader in SaaS-based workforce management and emergency response systems that improve both the quality of life and the bottom line, today announced a partnership with Workforce Prescriptions of Hudson, FL, to license Labor Utilization Audit™, a service designed to discover root causes of labor waste, and Hospital Pay IQ® Reports, the company’s quarterly reports that measure the labor efficiency of hospitals.

By using labor analysis tools to help determine the root causes of labor misalignment, and implementing people-sensitive corrective changes, Concerro is now able to develop and sustain permanent labor cost reductions that help healthcare organizations improve productivity without diminishing capacity.

“Concerro is committed to helping hospitals reduce labor costs and improve efficiency through workforce management systems that leverage resources across an enterprise and create a versatile workforce,” stated Graham Barnes, CEO of Concerro.  “These tools are another way for us to help not only our 500+ client facilities, but all hospitals improve labor efficiency by identifying specific labor waste opportunities for potential corrective solutions.”

Concerro will utilize the Labor Utilization Audit methodology to analyze multiple areas of labor performance including the effectiveness of scheduling practices, use of premium pay and agencies, cause of delays in care, impact of policies on labor availability and levels of productivity.

The analysis gathers quantitative, qualitative and statistically-driven data encompassing over 1,500 distinct data points to determine root causes of labor misalignment.  Custom reports detail how much labor waste is occurring and why, how much labor waste is recoverable and when, and provide actionable recommendations for creating change-sensitive progress against recapture goals.

“The Labor Utilization Audit identifies an average of $11.4 million in annual waste per hospital and eventually results in over $7 million of realized annual savings,” stated Charlie Dawson, Workforce Prescription’s president and CEO.  “This track record, amortized over Concerro’s hundreds of clients, creates the opportunity for Concerro to make a measurable bottom line impact on an entire industry – a thing most companies can only dream about.  We are proud of our partnership with Concerro and pleased to have finally discovered a firm with whom we were value aligned.  We look forward to working with Concerro in accomplishing our shared vision of ensuring the sustainability of America’s healthcare system.”

Under terms of the agreement, Concerro will also license quarterly updated Pay IQ reports on nearly 3,600 acute facilities in the United States.  These reports help hospitals determine their unique Pay IQ score and levels of labor waste – both calculated using algorithms that adjust for differences in reimbursement and cost of living, for individual hospitals.  Pay IQ scores range from 80 (challenged) to 140 (genius) and are a validated indicator of the effective use of labor spending.  Healthcare leaders can now access their custom Pay IQ report on Concerro’s website for free.

Concerro also utilizes Workforce Prescription’s Hospital Labor Waste Recapture Calculator, which identifies key indicators of labor waste to create an opportunity estimate of an organization’s cost improvements based on care and work processes, resource design, allocation, and productivity and management of the continuum of care.


About Concerro
Concerro is a healthcare Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that provides healthcare workforce and emergency response and incident management systems that improve both quality of life and the bottom line by reducing costs through optimization rather than reduction.  The company has won numerous awards and recognition, including being named to the prestigious Inc. 5000 for three consecutive years, and receiving Red Herring’s 100 most promising private technology ventures in North America and Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) awards.  To learn more, visit www.concerro.com, or follow Concerro on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Concerro.

 

About Workforce Prescriptions
Workforce Prescriptions is an evidence based consulting firm headquartered in Hudson, FL that provides assistance to hospitals desiring to enhance revenues, reduce cost of labor and length of stay, or improve work practices/processes.  Workforce Prescriptions focuses primarily in the not-for-profit sector of healthcare in order to assist those organizations whose own mission requires them to take extraordinary risks in order to ensure access to quality healthcare for the neediest of Americans.

 

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Good Samaritan Hospital, Los Angeles Receives National Quality Award for Labor Excellence

Posted on: November 26th, 2010 at 10:58 am EST
HUDSON, Fla., Nov. 26, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- The Paradigm Award Committee (www.paradigmaward.org) announced that Good Samaritan Hospital of Los Angeles (www.goodsam.org), a leading hospital based in Southern California, was recently selected to receive the prestigious Paradigm Award.

The Paradigm Award was created to honor hospitals that have gone above and beyond in their efforts to foster efficient labor practices without resorting to workforce reductions or dramatic top-down mandates. Knowing how difficult this is, The Paradigm Award was commissioned to encourage the recognition and celebration of institutions who have managed to reach and sustain consistent levels of labor efficiency while illustrating their ability to balance the often contradictory needs of their three main constituencies: their patients, their staff and their need to remain financially viable.

The Paradigm Award is presented to hospitals that have made the greatest measurable strides in improving labor efficiency and done so in a manner that promotes the measurement, governance and sustainability of their results.

"Winning the Paradigm award is no easy feat," claims Charlie Dawson, President of Workforce Prescriptions (a labor utilization consulting firm).  "As a member of the Paradigm Award Committee, I can tell you that of more than 100 hospitals that have applied for the award in the past 36 months, only Good Samaritan reached the level of sustainable change necessary to achieve it."

Good Samaritan began its journey to labor excellence with the October 2008 decision to engage Workforce Prescriptions (www.workforcerx.org) in performing a Labor Utilization Audit.  The Labor Utilization Audit™ is a service offering designed to allow an acute hospital to identify areas of labor waste/redundancy that can be eliminated without creating a derogatory impact on staff.

"The goal of the audit was to move the organization away from examining how many people were being paid in favor of how they were being paid and for what work," states Dan McLaughlin, VP of Professional Services at Good Samaritan and chair of the initiative.  "Our successful outcomes derived from first measuring what mattered then reducing the cost-per-hour of labor and overall labor dependence rather than from attacking people or programs."

Andrew Leeka, Good Samaritan's President & CEO goes on to state, "The creation of sustainable change required the organization to first take a step back and evaluate our current understanding of the processes (and their corresponding measures) that drive labor utilization.  It then became easier to address labor waste at the root cause rather than at the visible symptom level. Both the Labor Utilization Audit and the 84 labor competencies of the Paradigm Award Evaluation Process provided us with the ability to focus our efforts on waste reduction and put us in control of driving the results we desired."

Such results of Good Samaritan's efforts are unequivocal.  In a deeply challenged payor environment, with a significant level of organized workforce, state mandated staffing ratios and an abundance of uncompensated care, Good Samaritan has managed to create a change in operational bottom line performance of over $7M annually and the emergence of the first true sustainable operational profitability in over a decade.  They have done so without layoffs, pay cuts or radical policy changes that mandated program elimination.

"This is exactly what the Paradigm Award is intended to recognize," claims Dean Kristiniak, Paradigm Award Committee member, "finding an organization that has transcended the standard measures of productivity, waste measurement and labor management to arrive at that meaningful destination on the far side of change . . . controllability.  We can't wait to write the $10,000 Award Check to Good Samaritan and celebrate their amazing achievement with them!"

About Good Samaritan

Today, Good Samaritan Hospital is more than a community hospital. A world-class academic medical center affiliated with both USC and UCLA Schools of Medicine, Good Samaritan has 408 licensed beds.  Recognized as One of America's 50 Best Hospitals 4 years in a row in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 by HealthGrades, Inc. Good Samaritan supports eight Centers of Excellence that focus on advancing the science of medicine while providing outstanding patient care.

For more information about Good Samaritan, go to:  http://goodsam.org/about/index.php

About the Paradigm Award

The Paradigm Award was created to honor hospitals that have gone above and beyond in their efforts to foster efficient labor practices without resorting to workforce reductions or dramatic top-down mandates. Knowing how difficult this is, The Paradigm Award was commissioned to encourage the recognition and celebration of institutions who consistently try to balance the often contradictory needs of their three main constituencies:

  • Their patients
  • Their staff
  • Their need to remain financially viable


 

The Paradigm Award is presented to hospitals that have made the greatest measurable strides in improving labor efficiency.

For more information about the Paradigm Award, go to:  http://www.paradigmaward.org/

About Workforce Prescriptions

Workforce Prescriptions is an "evidence based" consulting firm headquartered in Hudson, FL that provides assistance to hospitals desiring to: enhance revenues, reduce their cost of labor & length of stay or to improve their work practices/processes. Workforce Prescriptions focuses primarily in the not-for-profit sector of healthcare in order to "assist those organizations whose own mission requires them to take extraordinary risks in order to ensure access to quality healthcare for the neediest of American's."

The Labor Utilization Audit™ is a service offering designed to allow an adult acute hospital to identify areas of labor waste/redundancy that can be eliminated without creating a derogatory impact on staff. The audit comes with a $1,000,000.00 annual recapture guarantee (to the bottom line) and the average return is nearly $6,400,000.00 without downsizing.

The goal of the audit is to move away from examining, "how many people are being paid" in favor of, "how they are being paid and for what work". Successful outcomes derive from lowering the cost-per-hour of labor and overall labor need rather than from attacking people or programs.

For more information about WRX please visit us at:  http://www.workforcerx.org

 

SOURCE The Paradigm Award Committee

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RELATED LINKS
http://www.paradigmaward.org
 

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WRX announces its 2010 Hospital Scholarship Program

Posted on: August 16th, 2010 at 3:54 pm EST

HUDSON, Fla., August. 16, 2010 -- Workforce Prescriptions ("WRX") announced on Monday the opening of their annual Audit Scholarship Program to commence Tuesday, August 17th. 

Every year, WRX invites organizations who, based on unique and extraordinary circumstances, find themselves in challenging financial situations and provides a comprehensive labor and productivity audit with 2 years of free implementation at a nearly 60% reduction from Tier I pricing!
 
In 2010, WRX has selected 5 hospitals that qualify and will be sending scholarship invitations to them this week. Facilities not specifically invited, but who have compelling stories of extraordinary hardship, are encouraged to apply directly for the scholarship at: http://www.workforcerx.org/scholarship_signup.php
 
Organizations awarded the scholarship will receive a detailed audit that evaluates their labor standing utilizing data gathered through onsite interviews, online surveys and private portal driven data requests of over 1500 data items.  At the culmination of the audit, 3 reports will be generated and specific findings and recommendations for change presented.  Should the organization decide to pursue any of the recommendations, WRX travels onsite to facilitate change, design or provide software development for a period of up to two years at no cost.
 
WRX’s Labor Utilization Audits are focused on assisting organizations to reduce labor expense without reducing staff and have produced an average of nearly $7,000,000 in annual bottom line savings in nearly 170 health systems.
 
About the Labor Utilization Audit
Information on the Labor Utilization Audit can be found at: http://www.workforcerx.org/services_lua.php
 
About Workforce Prescriptions
Workforce Prescriptions is an "evidence based" consulting firm headquartered in Hudson, FL that provides assistance to hospitals desiring to: enhance their revenue opportunities, reduce their cost of labor & length of stay or to improve their human capital practices. Workforce Prescriptions focuses primarily in the not-for-profit sector of healthcare in order to "assist those organizations whose own mission requires them to take extraordinary risks in order to ensure access to quality healthcare for the neediest of American's."
 
Workforce Prescriptions can be contacted at (888) 343-8403 or online at http://www.workforcerx.org
 
 
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WRX Launches Healthcare Productivity Benchmarking Initiative

Posted on: May 27th, 2010 at 8:27 pm EST

HUDSON, Fla., May. 27, 2010/ -- Workforce Prescriptions ("WRX") announced on Wednesday an open invitation to participate in a research based productivity benchmarking initiative for adult acute hospitals. 

"Our goal in establishing this initiative is to provide adult acute hospitals access to high-quality, externally valid, comparative productivity data based on reasonable workload parameters reflective of the actual work that drives individual department labor dependency . . . and to do so at no cost. After all, it is their data – why should they pay to compare it", states Dean Kristiniak, COO of the company.
 
Long term evaluations of hundreds of hospitals post “benchmarking site visit” validates that many of the current measures and methodologies of hospital productivity benchmarking fail to capture either the actual work driving labor utilization or the unique operating circumstances that can create a huge diversity of work requirements from seemingly similar volumes. Specifically, the company believes that failing to consider levels of automation, the intrusion of collective bargaining, facility size and volume variability/volatility is a guaranteed way of ensuring the comparison of apples to oranges.
 
Charlie Dawson, President of Workforce Prescriptions claims, “It is neither valid nor accurate to use the oversimplified measure of, Patient Days as THE GOLD STANDARD MEASURE of productivity for a majority of departments in a hospital even if that hospital happened to be identical in every other way to all other hospitals in the benchmarking study group. Even for inpatient nursing departments, “adjusted patient days” provides a more valid dataset for comparison than simple Patient Days. With an adjusted patient day measure, at least some attempt has been made to accommodate variances in acuity & type of care provided. 
 
He goes on to say, “For other department types, individual workload measures have long been missing three important traits:
 
  •  that they be reflective of the actual work driving labor demand, which often isn’t patient volume
  • that they are readily comparable between facilities with different volumes, patient types and geographical/payer disparities
  • and that they are comprised of data readily available to the average institution. 
The measures established for this benchmarking effort are the result of collaboration with dozens of hospitals intent on overcoming all such issues and we look forward to sharing the joy of hospitals all over the country who realize that they will finally be able to compare meaningful data with hundreds of other hospitals and that they can do so for free!”
 
The organization expects that word of mouth, the participation of current and previous clients as well as a targeted outreach will result in a rapidly expand the pool of participating hospitals that will reach statistical significance within 90 days. But not all the executives agree on this!
 
“It will be really interesting to see how quickly hospitals sign up to participate in the initiative”, states Keith Bush, the firms CIO and creator of the custom privacy portal for the initiative. He poses some brutal questions of the industry when asking, “I wonder how many hospitals out there who have been spending $50,000, $100,000 or even $200,000 per year for productivity benchmarking data from third party vendors will hear about this new initiative and think, “It’s too good to be true”, or, “It must be junk to be offered for free”? But eventually, they will hear from a peer who has participated, that what we have built here (as a service to the industry) is actually best in breed. I think it will take until then for some of them to finally pull the trigger.”
 
Whether Mr. Bush is right or not remains to be seen, but one thing is certain . . . Workforce Prescriptions is well known for pushing the envelope of what “mission driven” means!  Says Mr. Dawson, “But isn’t that what a lifestyle/retirement company is for? . . . doing all those things that companies needing to earn a living wish they could do - but would wreck their bottom line if they tried?”
 
About WRX’s Productivity Benchmarking Initiative
 
Information on the Productivity Benchmarking Initiative can be found at:
To participate in the initiative, go to: 

 About Workforce Prescriptions

Workforce Prescriptions is an "evidence based" consulting firm headquartered in Hudson, FL that provides assistance to hospitals desiring to: enhance their revenue opportunities, reduce their cost of labor & length of stay or to improve their human capital practices. Workforce Prescriptions focuses primarily in the not-for-profit sector of healthcare in order to "assist those organizations whose own mission requires them to take extraordinary risks in order to ensure access to quality healthcare for the neediest of American's."
 
Workforce Prescriptions can be contacted at (888) 343-8403 or online at http://www.workforcerx.org

 

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The Pay Practice Audit gets a new name!

Posted on: January 8th, 2010 at 10:53 am EST

HUDSON, Fla., Jan. 8/ -- Workforce Prescriptions ("WRX") announced on Friday that it is changing the name of its premier service offering (the Pay Practice Audit). 

"It was time for a name that was more descriptive of the service", says Charlie Dawson, the company's President.  He goes on to state, "We aren't providing a compensation audit, what we are actually doing is examining the root causes and contributing factors of labor waste and determining the best way to reduce a hospital's overall labor dependence without impacting employee/patient satisfaction or quality of care.  The name of the service had itself become misleading and feedback from many customers informed our decision to make this change." 

The new name of the service is the Labor Utilization Audit, which according to company insiders is far more descriptive of the focus and intent of its efforts.

Dean Kristiniak, COO of Workforce Prescriptions says, "Labor Utilization is not about who you pay but about what they are doing and the results produced. The goal of efficiency should be improved productivity (reducing your "cost per output" while not diminishing your capacity). Unfortunately, challenges in: managing staff schedules, governing staff behavior, organizing care, creating patient synergy and optimizing work processes all contribute to unhealthy relationships between revenue and labor and ultimately undermine the sustainability of most productivity and throughput initiatives."

Mr. Dawson agrees and adds, "At Workforce Prescriptions, we strive to provide solutions that optimize rather than downsize a workforce by reconnecting labor spending with revenue! By first determining the root causes of labor misalignment and then implementing "people sensitive" changes, WRX is able to create and sustain permanent labor cost reductions that are backed by a $1,000,000 (One Million) dollar annual bottom line guarantee."

About the Labor Utilization Audit

Information on the Labor Utilization Audit can be found at: http://www.workforcerx.org/services_lua.php

About Workforce Prescriptions

Workforce Prescriptions is an "evidence based" consulting firm headquartered in Hudson, FL that provides assistance to hospitals desiring to: enhance their revenue opportunities, reduce their cost of labor & length of stay or to improve their human capital practices. Workforce Prescriptions focuses primarily in the not-for-profit sector of healthcare in order to "assist those organizations whose own mission requires them to take extraordinary risks in order to ensure access to quality healthcare for the neediest of American's."

Workforce Prescriptions can be contacted at (888) 343-8403 or online at http://www.workforcerx.org

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