3 Reasons to Hire a Healthcare WFM Consulting Firm for Your Kronos Project
Under pressure to increase productivity while reducing operating expenses, more healthcare organizations are looking at Kronos for Workforce Management to better understand and manage their staffing levels and labor costs.
Other considerations putting WFM in the spotlight include workplace safety, the shift to remote work, compliance requirements, and union contracts and policies, just to name a few.
As health systems look to fully leverage the capabilities of Kronos, it’s important that they identify a partner with healthcare expertise to lead the implementation and support future upgrades and optimizations. Here are three reasons why:
Specialized Knowledge
Simply put, workforce management in healthcare is different than in other industries. In most hospitals, staffing is 24/7, and requires real-time adjustments to meet the needs of patients, while balancing clinician hours and costs.
Partnering with Healthcare IT Leaders (the KLAS ranked leader in Business Solutions Implementation Services) means working with a consulting team that understands the unique demands of healthcare scheduling and the downstream impact that certain decisions will have on patient outcomes, labor costs, and staff satisfaction.
We understand the entirety of the Kronos solution set for healthcare and can recommend cost-saving features like AI within Kronos Workforce Dimensions to intelligently identify best-fit resources to fill open shifts. Our repository of healthcare-specific Kronos configurations minimizes complex customizations and speeds time to deployment.
Healthcare Expertise On-Demand
A healthcare partner also brings clinical expertise to the table in a way that a garden-variety workforce management consultancy cannot. Our network of hospital executive and clinician advisors offer outside expertise when projects require it. For example, a consulting Chief Nursing Officer from our team might help your organization make decisions about nurse staffing levels and impacts to patient care.
This expertise also extends to a range of clinical applications commonly integrated with Kronos, such as Cerner, Epic and Meditech. If a project calls for integrating Kronos with an EHR system, our experts are equipped to complete the work without a need for additional third-party support – saving time and reducing complexity.
Collaborating on a Path Forward
When it comes to project management, a healthcare-focused consultancy has a better understanding of the roles of key stakeholders within a health system. Our project leaders are deeply experienced working across different departments in a hospital network to identify and support the goals of HR, Finance, IT and Clinical leadership.
When Healthcare IT Leaders begins a Kronos project, we set up a browser-based project collaboration tool that gives our team, the customer’s team, and representatives of Kronos access to the same dashboard. Everyone can see the status reports in the same format, and users with the appropriate permissions can create and assign tasks. By streamlining information flow, project managers spend less time in status meetings reviewing what already happened and more time celebrating achievements and moving to the next steps of a project.
When it’s time for your hospital or health system to optimize its Kronos implementation, call on a services firm with both workforce management and healthcare expertise. Contact Healthcare IT Leaders today to learn more about our Kronos services.
Christine Hanna leads the Kronos Practice at Healthcare IT Leaders. She has participated in and led over 100 Kronos projects as a 20+ year consultant specializing in Workforce Management.
