The Problem
Wesley is a mission-driven nonprofit organization that operates four senior living communities across western Washington. Neal Martino, Vice President of Human Resources at Wesley, stated that one of their biggest challenges was connecting all the data across their communities. Without real-time, consolidated data to support trend analysis, cost control, and financial projections, the Executive Leadership Team was missing an essential component of labor management.
Like many in the long-term care industry, their communities rely on supplemental labor through registry or local staffing agencies; and utilizing a multitude of staffing agency partners creates an added complication along with new challenges related to vendor management. This environment can result in delayed or missing invoices, difficulty auditing hours worked against hours requested, extra labor hours to process a multitude of invoices and vendors, and a general inability to gain a holistic view of staffing needs, practices, and trends.
The Solution
Wesley researched and then made the decision to implement Kevala’s solution as it solved for today’s needs and offered possibilities for tomorrow. The Kevala platform seamlessly integrated each of Wesley’s four communities. It connected their schedulers, nurse leaders, and executive stakeholders, such as finance and human resources to a dashboard of centralized data needed to improve labor management.
Neal stated, "Kevala provides clear, intuitive dashboards that inform with confidence”. The dashboard displays real-time data on how agency staff is utilized by community, license type, and agency partner.
By gaining a real-time, insightful understanding of staffing needs, practices, and trends in each community, Wesley can now improve labor management outcomes and reinvest those gains to advance the mission of enriching the lives of older adults through community, choice, and continuing care.
“Kevala provides clear, intuitive dashboards that inform with confidence”
The Outcome
Neal leveraged the data in Kevala’s staff utilization dashboard in new and productive ways for Wesley. For example, the dashboard provides a comparison of staffing agency partners enabling Neal to identify the most valuable partners and strengthen those relationships. To minimize costs, schedulers can give priority consideration to agency partners with the most cost-effective rate or based on their reliability (fill rate).
Now that Wesley can see how much they are ordering and spending with each agency, forecasting becomes another tactical use of the Kevala dashboard. Understanding from a financial perspective the spend rate and future shifts at each community is a massive benefit to the organization. Additionally, comparing agency hours to job posting activity helps sync up actual business needs vs. advertising activity. This gives Wesley better insight into where and how to allocate talent acquisition strategy and budget.
What's Next
This new centralized view of data is a vital asset to Wesley that enables re-evaluation of rates and vendor partners to form longer-term, mutually beneficial partnerships through the Kevala platform. In addition, this centralized view provides new forecasting capabilities that positively affect financials and the company’s talent acquisition strategies.
