Big changes bring big challenges. In late 2007 after extensive discussions and budget deliberations, Resurrection Health Care decided to invest in a big change. The health care organization committed to enterprise-wide adoption of a common system for staffing and scheduling across all eight of our hospitals. (I serve as vice president of patient care services at Saint Joseph Hospital, one of the eight hospitals.)

With the size, scope and complexity of the implementation, accomplishing this big change was a big challenge -- super-sized, in fact. As we roll out the new application, super users are proving to be critical to our success. Other multi-hospital systems might benefit from learning how Resurrection identifies, empowers and utilizes super users.

Sponsored by the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth and the Sisters of the Resurrection, Resurrection Health Care is a not-for-profit Catholic health care organization in Chicago. Resurrection Health Care provides advanced medical care with compassion and hope in neighborhoods across the city. The system includes the aforementioned eight hospitals as well as ambulatory centers, nursing homes, retirement communities, and home health and behavioral health programs. The eight hospitals have a total of 2,300 staffed beds and handle more than 250,000 emergency department visits and 100,000 inpatient admissions annually.

By moving to one system for staffing and scheduling, Resurrection seeks to achieve several important objectives: consistency in the application of staffing and scheduling rules; optimized staffing to balance workloads and boost productivity; faster and more efficient scheduling; reduced use of overtime and outside agency staffing; and improved employee satisfaction and retention.

Whenever Resurrection selects a new system solution, our uniformity policy requires that it be used at all eight hospitals. Standardization helps us get best pricing from vendors, and it reduces system implementation and support costs by decreasing variation and complexity, which are cornerstone Lean Six Sigma objectives.

Staffing, scheduling solution

Resurrection has a master license agreement with RES-Q Healthcare Systems for the enterprise-wide purchase and implementation of RES-Q Labor Resource Management (LRM). This system supports enterprise staffing and scheduling by translating hospital workload

standards into specific staffing patterns by employee skill level. It calculates optimal staffing for all units and departments by shift and then creates complete employee schedules. The system includes comprehensive personnel management with personnel profiles for each employee. Certifications, license renewal dates, continuing education classes and credits, and special skill sets (e.g., chemotherapy administration and ventilator management) are among the types of data maintained.

When LRM is fully implemented, Resurrection will have 250 users managing staffing and scheduling for some 10,000 hospital employees (including nurses, all other clinical and non-clinical professionals, support personnel and clerical staff). Resurrection also opted for the Self-Scheduling and Patient Attribute modules along with patient classification development services. Resurrection is implementing the Patient Attribute Module with a real-time interface to the hospitals' ADT system in order to supply the data for calculating patient acuity for each inpatient. With this module we can use the system to account for acuity and schedule the correct number of staff with the right mix of skills. Thereby we can ensure that every unit has the appropriate number of nurses with the skill sets required to provide quality care given the complexity of patients' conditions and the intensity of services they are likely to require during the next shift. This capability also enables Resurrection to comply with Illinois regulations requiring hospitals to consider acuity in staffing.