From High Turnover to High Performance

Actalent's solution helped a healthcare system reduce costs and improve staffing by replacing travel nurses with local hires, leading to fewer patient re-admissions and expanded support during the pandemic.

Results at a Glance

The client saw significant cost savings by eliminating additional expenses

By switching to Actalent's solution, the client reduced their costs from $59,370K to $39K for 13 weeks

Actalent successfully onboarded 56 case managers

The client's system now has workforce stability and lower turnover

There was a notable reduction in re-admissions

The partnership led to a 24% reduction in re-admissions for Medicare patients and a 23% for the all-age/payer community

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The Client

A nationally recognized healthcare system and the state’s only comprehensive academic hospital.

The Challenge

The client was facing challenges with talent attraction, retention and service with their incumbent suppliers. They were consistently understaffed, had high turnover and faced moral issues existed due to employees having to work significant overtime, which affected their work-life balance and ability to care for patients.

From a business perspective, being understaffed impacted their ability to admit and discharge patients. This process is critical to ensure they can take care of the patient community, maintain a high reputation for the care they provide and significantly impacts revenue when the system isn’t able to properly admit and discharge patients. They didn’t have enough case managers for admission of new patients, nor enough case managers to properly release patients deemed healthy for discharge. This meant hospital beds remained full, leaving no room for re-admittance until the proper process is completed. There were significant cost implications from keeping patients in the hospital longer than needed. Their primary supplier also provided travel nurses to fill the gap instead of finding local talent, which also had significant cost implications.

The Actalent Solution

Our account manager understood this healthcare system’s obstacles and negative consequences to their business. He ran the numbers to estimate total costs associated with their travel nurse solution with the incumbent vendor. He presented his case and showed the client the costs they were currently incurring:

$400/week room and board estimate, minimum of 13 weeks = $5,200
Cost of two trips home equating to $1K plane tickets/transportation
$70/day per diem equates to $6,370K + 90/hour billing rate = $46,800
If the hospital wanted to offer the traveling nurse a full-time job, there is always a buyout cost and since they live in other states, they most likely won’t be able to be bought out
Total estimated cost was $59,370K for 13 weeks and $118,740 for 26 weeks, versus an hourly billing rate only (no perdium, no travel, no hotel) equating to $39,000K for 13 weeks and $78,000K for 26 weeks – cost savings of $40,740

The Results

The healthcare system agreed to allow Actalent to support the case manager hiring. Initially, we continued to compete with the incumbent vendor. Since inception of this proposal in late 2019, Actalent has onboarded 56 case managers. This system now has workforce stability and lower turnover. Additionally, since our partnership began, they have experienced a 24% reduction in their re-admissions for their Medicare 65+ patients between 2020 and 2021 and 23% reduction in their re-admissions for their all-age/payer community of patients.

As a result of positive business results supporting case managers, our partnership expanded. During the pandemic, Actalent was given an entire swab pod for 2020 and 2021 to manage staffing levels. We successfully onboarded 42 CTAs over a weekend to enable the university to allow students to safely attend classes. In addition, Actalent has consistently supported sitters onboarding and managed a consultant community of 100+ consultants. Given our expansion, we onboarded our own on -premises team to support our workforce. We have an on-premise executive, on-premise account recruiting manager and a dedicated partner for timekeeping.