El Camino Health serves residents in the San Francisco Bay Area with two not-for-profit acute care hospitals in Los Gatos and Mountain View. The health system also includes 19 clinics.
Like so many health systems, El Camino – during the pandemic and in its aftermath – experienced the dual problems of having elevated employee retention challenges and overburdened nurse managers.
THE CHALLENGE
Pre-pandemic, a strength of the health system had been consistently maintaining an RN nurse turnover rate of only 5% – but that jumped to 12% during the COVID-19 crisis. Employee engagement was a closely related concern.
Nurse managers are incredible assets to both the employee and the patient experience, and El Camino knew that enhancing support for them was critical to turning the situation around and restoring its engagement and retention levels.
“Nurse managers at our two hospitals were not just managing heightened workloads, those workloads were also becoming increasingly complex and overwhelming, ultimately pulling managers away from their teams and increasing their burnout risk,” explained Cheryl Reinking, DNP, RN, chief nursing officer at El Camino Health.
“Finding ways to facilitate more regular, meaningful manager/team member interactions was essential to boosting both employee and manager satisfaction and we knew we needed to innovate to make this realistic for our managers,” she continued. “Simplifying our leaders’ daily work – and the technology they used to do it – was a key focus for us.”
PROPOSAL
El Camino Health turned to health IT vendor Laudio’s platform for help. The platform was designed specifically to centralize and streamline frontline managers’ work. It offered the ability to simplify managers’ core workflows and the number of systems they needed to interact with on a regular basis, reducing complexity for them and freeing up much-needed time to reallocate toward their teams, Reinking said.
“Integrations with other core systems meant our managers could have a true hub for their work, powered by accurate data from systems of record like our HRIS,” she noted.
“The AI and built-in workflows in the platform also offered capabilities that would make it easier for our managers to capture opportunities for timely, personalized engagement with their individual team members – from celebrating birthdays and recognizing acts of going above and beyond to ensuring check-ins occurred with staff at key intervals,” she added.
With the new technology, managers wouldn’t need to go searching for information or keep track of it on their own – the system would surface it for them through dynamic recommendations and even uncover opportunities for recognition that humans could not readily spot on their own in a sea of data, she said.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
With the technology, El Camino Health has been able to offer nurse managers a novel centralized workflow hub, designed specifically to streamline, automate and help prioritize their work. Integration with other systems was a must-have as the health system considered other potential technologies.
“We already have a robust HRIS in place; the Laudio platform sits on top of that, pulling data from it and making that data increasingly actionable for managers,” Reinking explained. “For example, the platform uses AI to present dynamic recommendations to managers for high-impact, personalized actions they can take with their team members and makes it easy to act on those.
“Now, it’s much easier for managers to keep track of team members’ birthdays, work milestones and more, plus uncover specific opportunities to recognize them for a job well done,” she continued. “With this system, our managers don’t need to go looking for the data – the data is presented in the form of insights and actions; it takes so much of the work and interpretation off of managers’ plates.”
Nurse managers have a wide array of different types of responsibilities and typically a large number of direct reports. They used to have to access so many different systems to accomplish their core tasks, but now the platform puts key workflows in one place, prioritizes high-impact actions, and makes regular, best practice staff engagement feasible.
“It’s not just another ‘thing’ for managers to use – this platform is truly making their work more efficient and allowing them to spend more time on the parts of leadership that are most rewarding for managers,” she added.
RESULTS
The new platform has played a key role in El Camino Health’s success restoring the RN retention rate to pre-pandemic levels. The health system has reduced RN turnover by seven percentage points, which now is back to approximately 95% RN retention.
“This stability yields a multitude of benefits for our organization, our staff and our patients – from improving staffing and operational efficiency to enhancing organizational culture and patient experience,” Reinking reported. “Financially, restoring retention has enabled us to avoid almost $850,000 in RN replacement costs in our highly competitive market – not to mention all of the significant time investments required to recruit and onboard replacement RNs.
“We’ve also improved our employee engagement indicator scores,” she continued. “Of particular note, leaders classified as strong Laudio platform users have improved their leader index scores more than the less active users.”
While scores improved across the board, the leader index scores for strong platform users rose 2.6 percentage points more than their counterparts – a clear reflection of the power of a platform that helps leaders follow best practices and engage consistently and meaningfully with their team members, she said.
“The most exciting part is that we’ve done all this while simultaneously making our nurse managers’ daily work easier and enabling them to shift more focus to their teams,” she noted. “Engagement and retention have improved and so has operational efficiency; we are constantly finding new ways to do things faster and better by centralizing and completing them in the platform.
“We just recently moved our leader patient rounding and quality audits into the platform, too, incorporating another key leader workflow to further boost efficiency and reap the benefits of an integrated platform,” she added. “We are hearing very positive feedback from our leaders about how glad they are to now have these essential workflows in the platform, too.”
ADVICE FOR OTHERS
When considering technology for nurse managers, it’s critical to assess how it will fit into the daily realities of their roles and in the context of the other systems in use, too, Reinking advised.
“Will it truly simplify their work and free up capacity?” she asked. “Does it integrate with the other systems in use, pull data from them, and actually cut down on the various places a manager needs to log into – or is it additive to the existing tech stack?
“Be sure to get an understanding of how much direct user research the vendor does for feedback and product development, too,” she continued. “Assess how much they understand the unique needs of nurse leaders and whether they are designing technology with them in mind – or if what you’re considering is a more general solution for many different types of roles.”
The scope and actionability of the data in any new system is also a key consideration, she added.
“Hospitals and health systems often have so many different systems in use and so much data technically available, but managers don’t have the time to go looking for insights every day,” she said.
“Instead, they need takeaways to be surfaced up to them and, ideally, those insights should be accompanied by clear and actionable next steps,” she concluded. “And the time spent acting upon the insights must lead to the outcomes and goals they are expecting to achieve, such as improved staff engagement.”
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