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
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-erm agency labor with Works Flex, which allowed them to streamlineburdensome 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 mindest 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.
One key call-out that allows Mercy to operate efficiently at their scale is the tiered distribution of open shifts supported by Works OnDemand. 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 workforce group 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 sequencing allows achievement of exceptionally high fill rates, while keeping labor costs sustainable.
Works OnDemand deploys autonomous staffing intelligence on top of your core scheduling and payroll system - UKG, ShiftWizard, Symplr, or Infor - optimizing every open shift in real-time across your entire workforce ecosystem. Works doesn't just fill shifts - it operates as an always-on network of financial analysts, filling shifts at the right cost with the right resource, prioritizing productivity.
Labor Productivity Optimization: Fairness, delivered. Dynamic incentive management automatically adjusts shift premiums based on real-time supply and demand, eliminating unnecessary spend while ensuring fill rates at a scale not previously achievable.
Relieve Administrative Burden without Additional Hiring: Autonomous shift matching returns 30% of unit managers' time without increasing Central Staffing personnel.
Finally Cure the “Wait and Negotiate” Problem: Works combines incentive assignment and sequenced shift distribution to rapidly change shift claiming behavior. Within 3 pay periods of go live, Works clients experience a reversal of staff behavior - with most shifts claimed at least 2 weeks in advance of shift start.
Enterprise-Wide Fill Rate and Spend Visibility: Real-time visibility into incentive and fill rates by unit over time helps identify opportunities to right-size the workload planner and staffing strategies and prevent chronic spending. Glorious.
