The Challenge
Like many alike, this skilled nursing facility found themselves struggling to keep their 123 bed facility fully staffed after the Covid-19 pandemic. Since nurses and caregivers have been leaving their full time positions in favor of the schedule flexibility and higher pay they can find working through a staffing agency, they turned to temporary staffing agencies to help fill the gaps in their schedule.
But even the high volume staffing agencies couldn’t meet their needs so they were forced to work with more and more agencies. And with each new agency came additional complexity to their process for requesting a caregiver, communicating schedules, passing credentials, and approving/declining staff in a coordinated way. “
We needed more staffing agencies to cover our open shifts, but how do you keep all these agencies straight? Communicating with each one individually was too hard, so we set a limit of working with only 3 agencies at a time,” said the Executive Director.
The Solution
During their hunt for reliable and available staff, they began working with Kevala. Kevala provided W-2 per diem employees through an app where their scheduling coordinator could submit their open shifts and caregivers in Kevala’s network would be immediately notified and could pick up those shifts.
As the need for additional per diem staff continued to rise, Kevala added a feature to their app that allowed the facility to share their open shift details not only with the Kevala network of staff, but with any outside agency partner as well. They call it Open Shift Management.
“Kevala’s platform allows me to click a few buttons and my shifts are instantly dispersed to everyone who needs to know about them.”
Now, rather than maintaining many lines of communication through emails, texts, and phone calls with their different agencies, this skilled nursing facility has one central location for shifts to be posted and filled. Everyone gets instant updates that they need to do their jobs well through this new system.
“Kevala’s platform allows me to click a few buttons and my shifts are instantly dispersed to everyone who needs to know about them,” the ED said. “It has helped us completely streamline the agency process and fill shifts.”
The Results
Now that they are posting all of their available shifts through Kevala, they can easily work with more agencies and, ultimately, fill more shifts at their facility. There is more competition for the shifts they have available which has the added benefit of driving quality up and prices down.
“We’re filling over 96% of our open shifts through Kevala," said the ED, "We’re not having the problem of not being able to fill shifts anymore because of the platform. And the pool of people is so much larger now because we can easily work with more agencies.”
That means they are filling more shifts with the highest quality and most cost effective caregiver available.
