Accumen Products
- • Lab Operations Management
- • Schedule Excellence Analytics
Introduction
Laboratory staffing can be a challenging part of a lab leader’s routine duties. Ensuring the right number of people per hour, at the correct time of the day/night is critical to meeting a hospital’s clinical needs for patient care and discharge. Additionally, post-pandemic shortages in qualified, experienced technical personnel make it difficult to cover shifts and time off requests.
Accumen Data Analytics
Accumen provides leaders with analytic tools for an objective analysis of department schedules. Pairing that with hourly volumes of lab orders, we provide our clients the information and ideal staffing scenarios for each department in the clinical and AP labs. Further analysis is conducted to ensure that staff are working to their highest credentials, making the best use of lab assistants and other support staff.
Accumen Data Analytics (ADA) compiles lab orders volume by hour with current schedules for each lab department, graphically displaying them to show the leader the ideal schedule.
Visually, this can demonstrate if scheduling needs to be adjusted by hour or number of staff in the department. For example, the current staffing scheduled indicated by the Orange Line displays staffing earlier in the day than volumes warrant. Shifting staff start times to later in the day would better align with the workload volume, see the proposed optimal required staffing highlighted by the Blue Line.
For departments with workload that is very manual, such as Microbiology and Blood Bank, or with lengthy processing times such as Histology, other Accumen analytics are used to calculate the time for each type of test. This is also assessed along with test order volume to optimize productivity and capacity in those departments.
Volume shown as Grey Bar
Conclusion
With these assessments, Accumen can help laboratories identify where changes are needed and how best to implement those changes. Part time employees or per diem can be utilized instead of on-call staff to reduce labor costs when staffing needs are highest for time periods of less than a full shift, such as a 4 hour morning run.
Labor costs account for some of the top dollar spends in the clinical laboratory. Additionally, recruiting and retaining talent continues to be a challenge for hospitals in our post-pandemic world. Accumen’s exclusive tools for assessing client workload and productivity expectations allow us to serve our client in a way no other consulting teams can.
About Accumen:
Accumen’s team of highly experienced subject matter experts (SMEs) are ready to create and recommend solutions to begin improving operations in your laboratory. Our methods, processes, and tools are designed to retain staff in a tight labor market, reduce costs, increase revenue, improve processes, and increase patient safety and satisfaction. Some recommendations are department-specific, while many apply broadly to lab management as a whole.
