St Vincent’s Health – Automated Rostering
Turning hospital admin time into patient-facing time
Project
Date: April 2023 – Present
Background: St Vincent’s is Australia’s largest not-for-profit provider of health and aged care services, with 3 public and 10 private hospitals, and 23 residential aged care communities.
Across the private hospitals division, Nurse Unit Managers (NUMs) were spending a significant amount of time creating and transcribing rosters into the hospital’s payroll software – Kronos. Given the large number of rosters that needed to be created across each hospital ward, limitations of Kronos’ web interface meant that the process was complicated, manual, repetitive, error-prone and highly time-consuming.
The complexity of rostering to meet budgeted staff counts was exacerbated by the lack of a standardised process across the 80 wards in 10 private hospitals. Some had even reverted to paper! This manual data processing was taking away valuable time from key healthcare staff which should instead be spent on patient care.
Background: St Vincent’s is Australia’s largest not-for-profit provider of health and aged care services, with 3 public and 10 private hospitals, and 23 residential aged care communities.
Across the private hospitals division, Nurse Unit Managers (NUMs) were spending a significant amount of time creating and transcribing rosters into the hospital’s payroll software – Kronos. Given the large number of rosters that needed to be created across each hospital ward, limitations of Kronos’ web interface meant that the process was complicated, manual, repetitive, error-prone and highly time-consuming.
The complexity of rostering to meet budgeted staff counts was exacerbated by the lack of a standardised process across the 80 wards in 10 private hospitals. Some had even reverted to paper! This manual data processing was taking away valuable time from key healthcare staff which should instead be spent on patient care.
Results
To address this inefficiency, we introduced a standardised way for the NUMs to rapidly prepare rosters using an Excel-based tool which is now uniform across all wards and hospitals. Once a roster is complete, the NUM emails it to a UiPath digital worker who works 24×7 to validate and transcribe the rosters into the Kronos workforce management system. The digital worker informs the sender if the roster was submitted in an incorrect format or if any entries require the NUM’s further attention.
Result: The intervention resulted in a significant time-saving of approximately 3.1 Full-Time Equivalents (FTE) or 3900 annual business hours, which were redirected towards patient care. This also led to a 40% reduction in processing time, resulting in increased satisfaction among NUMs across all 10 hospitals.
Result: The intervention resulted in a significant time-saving of approximately 3.1 Full-Time Equivalents (FTE) or 3900 annual business hours, which were redirected towards patient care. This also led to a 40% reduction in processing time, resulting in increased satisfaction among NUMs across all 10 hospitals.