Drive workforce efficiencies across all work types - nursing, allied health and non-clinical
Attract and retain quality talent
Decrease premium and agency spend in a sustainable way that still supports retention goals
Systemwide increase in inpatient fill rate of 8% (85% to 93%)
44% reduction in average incentive rates systemwide
Direct savings in excess of $100M due to reduction in premium and agency spend
Uses UKG for inpatient scheduling
55 acute care and specialty hospitals across 5 states
$10B+ in annual revenue
25,000+ Mercy employees engaged on the Works platform
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 to attract and retain their most valuable resource: their 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 55-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.
This program has expanded beyond the initial cohort of inpatient nursing to now cover allied health clinical roles as well as many non-clinical functions. In 2025 alone, Works was responsible for filling approximately 2,000,000 shift hours through the Works OnDemand platform.
Since launch, Mercy has attributed over $100M in direct premium and agency labor savings to the collaboration with Works. In addition to cost savings, Mercy Works OnDemand has automated away significant administrative burden while supporting retention and safe staffing level achievement.
“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.”
Beth Melgren
Director of Operations - Workforce Strategy
Drive Workforce Efficiencies
Existing staffing efforts to plan for and fulfill open shifts required constant manual interventions from unit leadership and central staffing teams. This prevented focus on higher-order priorities, such as staff development and patient care.
Attract and Retain Quality Talent
Mercy shifted thinking from basic "hire and retain" to a focus in innovation. This included a focus on providing core staff with flexible work options such as shorter shifts, and flexible work models - such as a direct-employ, gig-model that supported employees with higher flexibility needs. Mercy adopted a mindset of "capturing as many work hours as possible from the clinicians in our communities."
Decrease Premium and Agency Spend Sustainably
The Works platform has allowed Mercy to manage premium spend smartly from an enterprise-wide mindset. Works hours are more widely distributed across core staff as a result of the platform's automation capabilities. The project results speak for themselves - systemwide fill rates have jumped from 85% to 93% while reducing premium labor spend by over $100M since Works was deployed across the system.
How Did Mercy Partner with Works to Achieve These Goals?
The partnership began with a proof-of-concept program and heavy development support from Works for customizations recommended by Mercy for their environment. Mercy and Works partnered to integrate Mercy's existing scheduling solution, SmartSquare, with Works OnDemand to power fully autonomous shift recruitment across all types of staff - core, part-time, float resources, direct/gig and contract labor. After a year of deployment, Mercy implemented UKG for core scheduling, and the Works team facilitated the cutover to ensure a seamless, consistent user experience for open shift claiming.
The partnership continues with a co-development mindset to this day, with the Works team soliciting optimization needs from the Mercy Workforce team to advance the OnDemand platform and Mercy's workforce strategy. The teams maintain a "data-first" mindset to consistently monitor fill rate and cost target achievements at the unit level through the Works OnDemand Dashboard and data management tools.
Creating a More Flexible, Efficient Workforce
Works has allowed Mercy to design a workforce model that supports multiple aims: Sustainable labor costs for the health system, maximum flexibility for staff, and the ability to rapidly address staffing needs to support patient experience and safety. Mercy operates across their ministries (regions) with standardized workforce groups - each with a unique mix of FTE percentage requirements, base pay, and incentive eligibility. Implementing a workforce model with this diversity of staffing types would otherwise prove daunting, requiring significant workforce management hiring and administrative burden. Works OnDemand prevents that outcome, however, as Mercy is able to manage across their ecosystem with automation.
Works OnDemand's tiered distribution of open shifts drives cost savings. As shifts become available, either through publication of a schedule, or through ongoing call-offs and demand changes, Works OnDemand exposes these shifts proactively to staff members based on Mercy's preference. Most often, average hourly cost is a driver of the sequencing. Shifts three weeks out may only be visible to core and part-time staff, while shifts three days out are visible across all workforce layers, including higher cost float and gig-model staff. This sequenced visibility allows achievement of exceptionally high fill rates, while keeping labor costs sustainable.
$100M+ in reduced premium labor spend over the past 3+ years attributed to Works
8% increase in systemwide fill rate (85% to 93%)
8% decrease in systemwide RN turnover (17% to 9%)
30% reduction in unit manager administrative time
20% reduction in staffing office time spent on scheduling tasks
Using Works' AI-driven automation engine and proprietary dynamic shift pricing algorithm, Mercy identifies which available clinicians are interested and available for specific open shifts, assigns the most appropriate incentive to that shift, and automatically fills each shift. The program has driven enterprise and unit-specific fill rates to consistently high levels, all while ensuring that premium labor spend goes only where it is needed most.
As a result, Mercy has driven direct cost savings in excess of $100M and meaningful reduction in frontline leadership admin burden - all while providing their coworkers with the flexible work options they want and need.
By leveraging Works and executing an enterprise strategy, Mercy's Workforce team has illuminated the pathway to designing a modern, sustainable and flexible healthcare workforce strategy. If you are interested in connecting with the Mercy team to learn more about their journey, our team would be glad to make the connection.
