Case Study

How Mercy created a more flexible, efficient clinical workforce leveraging Works

MERCY HOSPITAL CENTER

Three Years Result

✓ Decrease Premium And Incentive Spend

✓ Drive Workforce Efficiencies

✓ Attract And Retain Quality Talent

Goals

8% Improvement in Fill Rates

44% Reduction in Average Incentive Rates System Wide

Over $100M Savings in Premium Labor Spend

About Mercy

Top 25 Largest US Health Systems

55+ Hospital System

50,000+ Employees

20,000+ Caregivers

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.
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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 55 hospital system. 

With more than 20,000 caregivers utilizing the “Mercy Works on Demand” flexible workforce program to pick up shifts and manage their workday more proactively, Mercy has saved over $100,000,000 dollars in premium labor costs, reduced administrative workload, nurse turnover, while supporting patient volumes and safe nurse staffing levels.

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.

We’ve built the mantra of getting the right staff, to the right shift, at the right cost. It’s not that the work ever stops. But we’re always working to improve and optimize the balance between what our clinicians want, what central staffing can offer, and the rates that make sense for Mercy.

Beth Melgren, RN

Clinical Operations Director,
Mercy

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.

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.

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.

Results

30%

of unit managers time freed up each week

16%

decrease in total costto deliver care

KEY WINS

Reduced labor costs with dynamic incentive pricing.

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.

Results

Over $100,000,000

dollars saved in premium labor spend over the last four years.

We’ve been able to decrease costs and increase the number of staff we have at the bedside, which is really our goal. At the end of the day, we’re all about taking great care of patients in a fiscally responsible way. Mercy’s goal is to improve the quality of care for our patients.

Pam Brouder, MSN, RN

Executive Director of Operations, Mercy

KEY WINS

Improved workforce flexibility with automated shift matching

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.