In an interactive session at Becker's 12th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, Jay Sage, Chief Growth Officer at Trio Workforce Solutions, facilitated a discussion with leaders from Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health on leveraging technology to manage labor in the physician enterprise.
Operations and clinical service line leaders from CommonSpirit shared insights on the evolution of their locum tenens program, which began in 2019. They highlighted the importance of data in managing interim provider needs, reducing clinical variation, and improving healthcare costs. The discussion underscored the need for a multi-pronged, technology-supported staffing approach that meets unique operational and clinical needs across various locations in health systems. Panelists also stressed the importance of continuous process improvement, a trusted partner that will prioritize the needs of your organization, and adapting to the ever-changing healthcare landscape.
Three key takeaways:
- Informed, effective decision-making hinges on access to relevant data.
CommonSpirit panelists underscored the necessity of reliable data to make informed decisions and drive process improvements. This is especially the case at health systems like CommonSpirit that span myriad geographies, hospital locations and workforce demographics.
"We had spent the better part of a year just trying to understand where we had locums, where we were spending the money, how we were using it and in what specialties — and why did recruiting needs not fill those gaps?" said Amanda Trask, President of CommonSpirit Locums and Traveler Network, LLC, and Senior Vice President of the health system's clinical institutes and service lines.
To answer these questions, CommonSpirit leveraged Trio Workforce Solutions' platform, Trio VMS, which has enabled the health system to gain workforce and financial insights that were previously unavailable.
"We look at it as a technology that helps support and enable our operations," Ms. Trask said. "We took the opportunity to really reinvigorate and redefine how we operate as an organization around our interim provider needs. If we didn't have the data and information out of this technology, we wouldn't know what direction to go."
- Stakeholder engagement and change management are critical to transformation.
Challenging the status quo can be an uphill battle, especially in healthcare — something CommonSpirit was acutely aware of while rolling out Trio's platform. Here, panelists highlighted the importance of a system-wide approach to adoption, including engaging with key stakeholders, understanding their needs, and managing change.
"It's not cookie-cutter," said Francie Barnett, CommonSpirit's System Director of Provider Operations. "Every facility, every region, has different concerns and different demands, so we really try to meet our facilities where they are and address those concerns upfront." - Resilient processes and workplace culture will help to maximize the benefits of new technology.
Ms. Trask and Ms. Barnett stressed that simply implementing new and innovative tools is not enough — to fully leverage capabilities of the technology, organizations need to be willing to adapt their processes and culture.
"Fix your processes. Fix your process, understand your need, your culture, and fix that while you're implementing a technology solution," Ms. Trask advised.
She also noted the essential role of data in driving executive buy-in and facilitating process changes.
"Data is very, very powerful, and in this case, that's our currency in the [locums] discussions," she said, highlighting a recent example of onboarding a CommonSpirit location onto the Trio VMS platform. "They said, ‘this seems rigorous — you're making me approve everything. I have to escalate approvals.' Before, they didn't have any kind of approval process for who could request a locum. We presented finance leaders with all the data to show where we've been to now, and their jaws dropped."