Facing the challenges of the post-pandemic labor market, Mercy partnered with Trusted Health to reduce labor costs, drive administrative efficiencies, and offer flexible work opportunities that attract and retain their most valuable resource; clinicians.
The combined team began by modernizing Mercy’s procurement of long-term agency labor with Works Flex, which allowed them to streamline burdensome legacy processes, driving workflow automation and refocusing the user experience on a critical but often overlooked stakeholder — the clinical hiring manager.
Mercy then implemented Works OnDemand to power autonomous open shift recruitment across their 40-hospital system to predict scheduling gaps in advance and intelligently recruit the best-fit clinician for every open shift. This enables Mercy to leverage a more flexible workforce (a combination of their core workforce, regional and local float pools, and internal gig nurses). Works then uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the appropriate incentive premium to offer to ensure an open shift is filled without overspending. Since launch, over 1,000,000 shifts have been filled across the 44 hospital system.
With Works Mercy has saved over $70,000,000 dollars in premium labor spend over the last three years. Mercy’s flexible workforce program Mercy Works on Demand has reduced labor costs, administrative workload and nurse turnover while supporting patient volumes and safe nurse staffing levels.
“At Mercy, our leadership team is fully aware of the changes and challenges in the healthcare space, and specifically, the clinical workforce. Mercy tried different incentives and staffing models and never was able to optimize its staffing. Once we saw Works and the way it can leverage workforce pools, on-demand, data analytics, and intelligent software to manage clinical labor and optimize care delivery, we knew it was a partnership and a product we needed to have. We not only use the product, but we have also invested in it as the catalyst to the future of Mercy.”
GOALS
What Were Mercy’s Goals?
Drive Workforce Efficiencies: Existing procurement processes required ongoing manual interventions, significantly burdening the front-line manager.
Attract And Retain Quality Talent: A preexisting nursing shortage was exacerbated by the pandemic and inspired Mercy to re-imagine their workforce strategy with flexibility in mind.
Decrease Unnecessary Labor Costs: Over-reliance on overtime, agency and incentive spend to fill shift gaps unnecessarily increased labor costs.
THE PARTNERSHIP
How Did Mercy Partner with Trusted to Achieve These Goals?
Combining deep clinical and market expertise with modern technology, Mercy turned to Trusted to deploy their next-generation, end-to-end staffing platform and optimize their entire clinical workforce in one environment.
By deploying Works Flex, Mercy simplified and streamlined labor mix allocation, requisition creation, onboarding, compliance and resource pool management processes in a single platform.
Mercy and Trusted then partnered to integrate Mercy’s existing scheduling solution with Works OnDemand to power fully autonomous shift recruitment across internal and external staff. The combined efforts enabled Trusted and Mercy to build a thriving, flexible workforce.
THE SOLUTION
How Did Works Help Mercy Create a More Flexible, Efficient Nursing Workforce?
Works allows Mercy to take stock of every workforce layer, including their core nurses, local and regional float pools and gig nurses. Beyond that, it automates the way Mercy fills shifts. Works identifies nurses in Mercy’s recruiting pool, flags open shifts, and pushes available shifts to best-fit nurses based on their preferences and experience. When open shifts remain, Mercy’s core nurse workforce uses the Works app to pick up incentive shifts. Remaining open incentive shifts are shared with gig and per diem workforce. Clinicians simply tap to pick up a shift and it is automatically logged in the staffing and scheduling system. This technology-powered workforce management system lowers costs, increases fill rate and dramatically reduces the amount of time nurse managers spend trying to fill shifts.
Key Wins
Improved Operational Efficiency by Automating Process
Multi-step workflows moved from ad-hoc email chains to structured, on-platform processes.
Leveraging the Works platform, Mercy moved multi-step and multi-stakeholder candidate submittal review, change request approval and offer processes away from ad-hoc email chains to structured, on-platform workflows. This significantly reduced manual touch points to fill positions while enabling end-to-end reporting and analytics to manage supplier performance. Centralizing and orchestrating processes within Works led to increased operational efficiencies across compliance and onboarding, time and invoicing and labor analytics.
- ✓ 20% reduction in staffing office scheduling time
- ✓ 16% decrease in total labor cost
“Your fill rates go up while you watch the amount of money you spend on incentive shifts go down”
Reduced Labor Costs with Dynamic Incentive Pricing
AI-powered pricing identified optimal incentive levels to balance fill rate and spend.
Leveraging Works’ artificial intelligence engine and proprietary dynamic shift pricing algorithm, Mercy was able to identify which available clinicians are interested in which shifts, load balance shift matches and selectively recruit to balance fill rate and spend. Doing so also allowed Mercy to incorporate external supply while mitigating the risk of agency overspend.
- ✓ Over $70,000,000 saved in premium labor spend over three years
Reduced Reliance on Travel Nurses by Systemizing Talent
Unified labor pools replaced costly external agency dependence.
Nurse turnover during the pandemic forced Mercy to rely on travel nurses as 25% of their workers. Trusted helped Mercy reduce use of travel nurses by creating unified labor pools across both internal and external resources to fill short-term gig and long-term needs.
- ✓ 62% reduction in system-wide agency spend
- ✓ 60% reduction in traveler utilization
Improved Workforce Flexibility with Automated Shift Matching
Labor mix optimization matched open needs with the best-fit, most cost-effective workers.
Trusted helped Mercy develop a staffing model that responded to clinician preferences, including flexible compensation, scheduling and leveraging multiple workforce layers. Works’ labor mix optimization engine matched open needs with the most qualified, cost-effective, interested and available workers, while automating the distribution process in a seamless way across Mercy’s total available pool of workers. This not only increased fill rates, but also eliminated unsafe staffing scenarios that caused low nurse morale and burnout.
- ✓ 21% of all shifts picked up by flexible Gig Workers
- ✓ 8% reduction in RN turnover
“At Mercy, our leadership team is fully aware of the changes and challenges in the healthcare space, and specifically, the clinical workforce. Mercy tried different incentives and staffing models and never was able to optimize its staffing. Once we saw Works and the way it can leverage workforce pools, on-demand, data analytics, and intelligent software to manage clinical labor and optimize care delivery, we knew it was a partnership and a product we needed to have. We not only use the product, but we have also invested in it as the catalyst to the future of Mercy.”
