Infor has enhanced its healthcare employee-management platform with new features that are designed to help hospital HR professionals better schedule, place and retain nursing staff.
The cloud-based platform – called CloudSuite Healthcare – has an upgraded payroll program that supports a shift scheduling program, a new feature that helps place new nurses in the right jobs and a tool to help health organizations identify key staffers who might be looking to leave.
Scheduling nurses’ shifts and paying them can be challenging due to overtime payment and union requirements. The scheduling tool can be used to plan shifts for various units based on each nurse's expertise and work requirement. “There are complex pay rules [for nurses] to deal with [including] extra pay if you work certain shifts and then there's the fact that in healthcare, nurses sometimes work more than one job” in a hospital or facility, says Weber. “You might be a full-time nurse in one unit or work [as a visiting nurse] part-time in somebody's house or a couple of other places. It's not just like clerks in a retail store where you just show up for your shift.”
CloudSuite Healthcare also includes a job-assignment feature. New hires are asked to answer a behavioral science questionnaire. The tool analyzes the data and help HR staff put staffers in the care division that is best suited for them. Placing newly hired nurses in the part of the hospital where they will work best is a unique challenge in the healthcare sector, says Mark Weber, senior vice president, Infor Healthcare Development. “Especially in healthcare, the best fit for a job is largely about your personality. People who prefer to work in the OR have a different kind of personality than somebody who works in the ER or with babies, which is a different personality than somebody who works in an outpatient clinic,” he says.
The Infor package can also help hospitals with one of their biggest challenges – staff retention. Healthcare facilities experience a significant first-year nursing turnover, and replacing nurses is very expensive, Weber adds. “A lot of that [happens] because people are not a good fit for the job that they're in. It has nothing to do with their clinical skills,” he says.
To address job retention challenges, Infor Cloudsuite Healthcare includes a Flight Risk Indicator (FRI), a proprietary algorithm-powered program that analyzes employee and company data to determine the risk of employees resigning. After analyzing data such as a nurse’s work schedule, job responsibilities and time on the job, the FRI provides “prescriptive intervention suggestions” to train a manager on approaching the employee who might be on the verge of leaving.
Infor Cloudsuite Healthcare also now includes Infor Rave, an employee recognition app, and Shift Billboard, an app that allows nurses to view and pick up additional shifts from their smartphone or tablet.
The updates are now available and pricing varies on the size of the nursing staff and whether or not the client is a previous user of Infor’s software.
