Tech as a healthcare industry gamechanger: Agency and Overtime Costs

With staffing needs and staffing resources in constant flux, it often seems impossible to find ways to cut agency and overtime costs. While you may have heard about technology solutions, you may still be unsure of how they work, or what benefit they bring to your healthcare facility. Recent success stories clearly demonstrate that workplace management tools and scheduling technology – like the BookJane platform – do more than shift administrative tasks from spreadsheets and the telephone to smartphones. They significantly reduce agency and overtime costs, meanwhile boosting staff engagement and improving quality patient care.

Amica Senior Lifestyles (a senior living home in Ontario, Canada) for instance, partnered with BookJane to increase the number of hours worked by team members. Before the implementation, Amica Assisted Living Coordinator Megha Khatri said “I would be living on my phone” as she worked to fill shifts through manual callouts. That process left casual and part-time staff unaware of available shifts and made it difficult to adhere to their seniority shift protocol. When Amica adopted the BookJane platform, shift fulfillment happened automatically, in minutes, and ensured shifts were filled by team members, not agency workers. The technology delivered. Amica increased the average number of hours worked by its team members.

The Seasons Retirement Communities partnership is another software platform success story. BookJane J360 helped the senior living facility better allocate staff and considerably reduce its agency spend. BookJane proved its value during the Covid-19 pandemic, helping Seasons answer the urgent need for additional staff resources. During the extraordinarily challenging first wave, BookJane J360 was instrumental in onboarding and mobilizing more than 1200 frontline healthcare workers.

Many tried and true strategies for managing staff overtime in healthcare and senior living facilities are, in fact, best managed by technology platforms. Instead of racking up expensive overtime costs by repeatedly asking your primary staff to work late, BookJane can be used to hire on-call, or “on-demand,” nurses from the BookJane Care Network who want part-time or extra work hours. The difference with new technology is that callouts are automatic and staff are empowered with the flexibility to choose the shifts they want on their own time, from their own devices. Software platforms make it easy for managers to calculate, keep track and set limits on overtime hours, too – automatically, without paperwork. The technology lets healthcare facilities cut overtime costs while supporting a healthy work-life balance for employees. Whatever the staffing needs, software platforms manage it rapidly, efficiently and at lower cost.

Introducing a software platform to your healthcare facility can reduce agency fees and reduce overtime costs. But that's not all it can do. Read the next piece in our series on new technology to find out how it boosts staff engagement.

For an in-depth look at how BookJane will improve your workplace environment, click here to set up a time to speak to one of their experts.

Learn how BookJane helps health care facilities improve shift fulfillment by 40%, dramatically decrease their time to fill shifts, and significantly reduce burdensome scheduling and administration time.