It’s not breaking news that labor costs are a significant pain point in senior care. Specifically, overtime can be a real budget buster. And trying to manage it while dealing with a crippling labor shortage proves nearly impossible. Altercare of Ohio decided they had had enough and enlisted the help of OnShift’s employee scheduling software to proactively manage overtime and cut down on the cost associated with it.
Director of HR Support, Chris Stach says Altercare was able to reduce their organization’s average overtime by about 2%. And considering that just a 1% reduction in overtime can save a community $24,000-$60,000 annually, just imagine the positive impact this reduction had to Altercare’s bottom line.
Watch the video to hear how Altercare uses OnShift to hit their labor budget and to ensure they're properly staffed to consistently provide high quality of care for their residents.
Transcript
One of the reasons that we really wanted to go with OnShift was because we wanted to be able to control as much of that cost as we can.
Before, we were looking more at historical data, and trying to make changes. Now, with OnShift, we can look into the future, and the nice part is, too, we can actually take action on that data before it happens. For us, that’s going to help us manage that 50% labor cost that’s been an issue previously.
And it really helps me with the visibility for how our community’s performing. Is our overtime up? Are PPDs in compliance? And it really helps me help the facilities manage their labor costs as well.
From an overtime standpoint, I believe prior to OnShift, we were roughly around, I want to say 4.5% to 5%. After OnShift, most of our communities average between 2% and 3%.
We use it in a proactive manner. Executives will look at the reports on a weekly basis to figure out what kind of plans need to be put in place, and also our facilities are looking at it on a daily basis and be able to see those projections and take actionable steps before anything becomes an issue.
For us, everything around our organization revolves around quality. To provide quality care, of course, we have to have the proper amount of staff. Really, with putting the OnShift system into place, we actually have visibility into that, so we know based on our census, based on our acuity levels, we know we’ll need to increase/decrease staff to make sure that we have quality 24/7 for all of our residents.
Without it, we really wouldn’t have the visibility that we do now to see what we need to do today, tomorrow, and the next day into the future to make sure that we have the quality care for the residents that we need.
