Greenville, N.C.-based ECU Health saw an opportunity to give leaders a clearer view of workforce trends so they could identify risks earlier and intervene before problems escalated. Like many health systems, ECU Health tracked turnover, vacancies, contract labor spending and patient experience. But those metrics lived in separate systems, making it difficult for leaders to see how they connected or use them to guide day-to-day decisions.
“The problem isn’t having data. We have tons of data,” Vickie Williford, a human resources business partner at ECU Health, told Becker’s. “The challenge is how we combine it. Not just HR metrics like turnover, exit survey and engagement survey data, but also operational metrics leaders are looking at every day: patient experience, overtime, contract labor spend. Getting them in one place where it’s just a few clicks for a leader to see what their departments and teams look like as a whole, and for it to be real-time, live data, that was the goal.”
Over 18 months, Ms. Williford and her colleagues built the Department Stability Index, an internal dashboard that pulls data from nine different platforms and consolidates it into a single view accessible to any supervisor or above. ECU Health’s information services team built the dashboard in-house, without an outside vendor or a separate budget line.
What it tracks
The DSI brings together five categories of data: turnover, vacancy, contract labor, patient experience and workplace aggression and safety incidents. Each department receives a red, yellow or green indicator, giving leaders an opportunity to discuss issues before they escalate into a crisis.
Kelly Weatherly, ECU Health’s chief human resources officer, said the dashboard is most useful because it brings multiple workforce and operational measures together, helping leaders recognize patterns over time.
“A unit could have high turnover, but that might be cyclical. We can go back over the course of years and see whether it’s a problem right now or an every-July problem for that department, maybe tied to nurses going back to school or residents rotating in,” Ms. Williford said. “If it’s turnover with no other compounding factors, the focus is different than if turnover is high and patient experience is low and team member experience is low. It allows us to provide more targeted intervention.”
The dashboard is updated in real time, so the conversations it generates look nothing like the old quarterly data dumps. Leaders log in, pull their department’s current indicators and discuss what’s shifted since last month. The goal, Ms. Williford said, is to intervene when something moves to yellow.
“The goal is not to do what we used to do, which was have the conversation when everybody’s in red and things are already overwhelming,” Ms. Williford said. “The goal is to have the conversation when something moves into yellow, to ask what’s triggering it, what’s a little off, how can we help support that leader now, so they don’t get to red. If they do reach red, we know it’s coming in advance instead of being caught off guard.”
The aha moment
For Ms. Weatherly, the first clear insight the DSI surfaced was the relationship between contract labor and patient experience.
“Not only is contract labor extremely expensive, but it can sometimes result in different patient experience across the system,” Ms. Weatherly said. “Being able to monitor and trend that over the course of the year helps me see cyclical relationships: Is this happening when we’re onboarding new nurses? When a large number of residents are coming into the medical center at a certain time of year? It allows us to trend in a way we couldn’t before.”
From the HR side, Ms. Williford said the dashboard also changed how her team understands the business units it supports. Metrics such as patient experience data and finance figures are now part of a shared picture.
“It helps us understand our business units better,” she said. “Previously, all of those data points came from different systems, so they weren’t readily available to leaders in one-stop shop. Our talent acquisition team could report on vacancy, and we could report on turnover and exit data, but they were siloed.”
When Ms. Weatherly demonstrated the dashboard to CEO Michael Waldrum, MD, he immediately suggested additional metrics. Many were already included.
“I was saying, ‘It’s already in there, Dr. Waldrum,'” Ms. Weatherly said. “Seeing the why behind it and watching him think about what else we can layer in and how we can evolve and innovate, that was a great moment.”
Built in-house
For health systems considering a similar tool, the ECU Health team’s advice is to build it internally if possible. The DSI was developed by business intelligence analyst Lenna Jones in collaboration with Ms. Williford and Jenny Brown, ECU Health’s executive director of medical group operations. Ms. Jones used Microsoft’s Power BI platform to bring together data from nine systems into a single dashboard.
“We have amazing partners in [information services], so this is not something we paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to an outside vendor to build,” Ms. Williford said. “We built it internally in our own dashboard, and that gives us the flexibility to change metrics and measurements as our organization evolves. That’s probably the most important thing, because in healthcare over the last six years, contract labor was everybody’s top concern, but as that pressure eases, we need to be able to shift the weighting of different factors.”
That flexibility has already been tested. Since the DSI launched, we have looked at adding additional partner teams such as quality and finance, and additional metrics have already been layered in. Since launch, all leaders supervisor and above have been given access across the system.
The time savings have been significant. What used to require a week of preparation for an executive meeting now takes seconds of live data retrieval.
“The days of creating a 60-page PowerPoint are long gone,” Ms. Williford said.
What’s next
Ms. Weatherly sees productivity as the next frontier for the DSI, particularly as ECU Health navigates workforce pressures specific to a rural system: a retirement wave building across the organization, ongoing pipeline challenges for nurses and allied health clinicians, and a financial environment that puts a premium on getting more from existing talent.
“Anytime we can figure out a way to solidify ourselves by using the talent we already have inside and getting a better view of the organization, that’s critical,” she said. “This tool has led us down that path of thinking about how we can innovate, much like AI. What can we do with less, or what can we do with the existing talent we have?”
Ms. Weatherly said a large cohort of experienced ECU Health employees is nearing retirement, creating simultaneous pressure on clinical and administrative pipelines. The DSI, she said, is one of the tools that will help the system see those gaps coming.
“We’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of seasoned, knowledgeable team members across the system in a variety of roles. So not only are we facing potential shortages of nurses and other allied health clinicians, but we also have a retirement bubble to prepare for,” Ms. Weatherly said. “That’s why it’s even more important to take the talent we have and work with them to help educate in the academic setting.”
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