Case study: How St. Luke's University Health Network strengthened labor productivity

St. Luke's University Health Network, a 972-bed nonprofit health system based in Bethlehem, Pa., was challenged with meeting staffing goals in an increasingly tight healthcare labor market. So the organization teamed up with Parallon Workforce Solutions to look at whether St. Luke's was deploying staff in the most optimal way for the health of the organization and its patients.

For the St. Luke's assessment, Parallon interviewed more than 100 managers across the health system's six hospitals, analyzed scheduling processes and systems and studied productivity benchmarks at the department level.

After the assessment, Parallon recommended that St. Luke's do the following:

  • Establish a formal labor productivity management department
  • Assign a chief staffing officer role at each facility
  • Educate department managers on productivity management concepts and techniques
  • Improve the labor productivity reporting system by automating units of service feeds, expanding the system to include monitoring of all departments
  • Routinely conduct labor productivity benchmarking both internally across departments and externally

St. Luke's is working to implement these recommendations and has already been able to strengthen labor productivity across the network by 20 percent.

 

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