Reduce premium and agency spend
Consistently staff to full bed capacity
Improve daily staffing stability
$2M+ net labor cost savings
Improved staffing coverage to operate at full bed capacity
Improved shift pickup behavior - over half of open shifts are claimed 20+ days prior to start
Uses Symplr inpatient scheduling
4 hospitals, 200 staffed beds
$750M net operating revenue
1,400 clinicians
Illinois-based Southern Illinois Healthcare (SIH), a regional network of four hospitals within a 70-mile radius, needed a modern solution to a system-wide staffing crisis. An organizational challenge was attracting and retaining clinical talent in the face of stiff competition from higher-paying health systems operating across other regions. The SIH clinical leadership team identified several challenges and opportunities to address, including:
- Staff demand for greater flexibility and earning opportunity
- Staff feedback that the process for open shift notifications was chaotic and frustrating
- Frontline leadership's need for automation of shift filling to reduce burden and achieve consistent fill rate targets
- Frontline leadership's ability to fill shifts early versus reactively trying to find resources last minute
- Organizational ability to decrease cost and be transparent about true open shift need
After researching evolving industry options and best practices, the SIH team implemented Works, an AI-powered platform, to centralize and automate their open shift staffing processes.
The results have been transformative. Works has empowered SIH nursing and allied health professionals to set preferences for when and where they would like to work extra shifts, receive daily shift opportunities via the Works mobile app, and view systemwide any shifts matching their credentials. This has greatly increased shift-claiming by core staff across units and facilities, in effect tapping into available labor supply that was invisible to leadership. In addition to addressing clinician ease of use, the entire process of recruiting for open shifts is now automated within Works - successfully and meaningfully reducing burden on frontline managers. Lastly, SIH is leveraging Works’ Dynamic Pricing capability, which uses AI to dynamically automate and assign incentives based on data, including expected time-to-fill, historical fill rates, and relevant supply and interest.
As a result of implementing Works, SIH has achieved four key objectives simultaneously:
1. Improved staff satisfaction and engagement
2. Reduced burden on frontline managers
3. Meaningfully lifted systemwide fill rates
4. Achieved direct labor cost savings in excess of $2M since implementation
With 83% of staff clinicians having adopted the Works platform, SIH has greatly reduced the likelihood of temporarily closing inpatient beds due to staffing shortages and has alleviated schedule imbalances due to last-minute staffing practices.
“Works has put the control back into our staff's hands. It alleviates the administrative burden, and is a proactive way of filling open shifts while reducing costs - versus the reactive, high-cost way that we had functioned for many years.”
Johnna Smith
Chief Nurse Executive
SIH St. Joseph Memorial Hospital
Ensure Fairness and Visibility to Increase Staff Earning Opportunities
SIH staff struggled to have visibility to open shifts off of their home unit. This limitation required staff to build a network of relationships to ensure access to open shifts. Works OnDemand immediately provides each staff members with visibility to all open shifts matching eligibility across the system, and includes the automatically-assigned incentive.
Address Staff Complaints About Constant, Unorganized Coverage Requests
SIH clinical leadership was aware that staff members would receive multiple daily texts, phone calls and messages from different unit leaders requesting shift coverage. This created a high level of frustration and disengagement from the entire process. With Works OnDemand, individual preferences are taken into account when delivering shift notifications, and staff can elect to collate all requests into a single Daily Digest for action. The silencing of the noise and targeting of the shift alerts has resulted in a drastic improvement in staff satisfaction.
Address the Manual Burden on Frontline Managers to Achieve Target Staffing Levels
On the flip side of the staff frustration, unit leaders were taking hours of their day to chase down staff members to get coverage, distracting them from higher value work. Today, with Works OnDemand in place, managers monitor upcoming fill rates and communicate with central staffing for float needs - and the rest of the open shift recruitment process happens via automation in the background. Leaders now have 8-12 hours per week to focus on patients and staff development.
Break the "Wait and Negotiate" Pattern
Clinical staff had learned, correctly, that it paid to wait. While managers burned hundreds of hours each pay cycle reaching out for coverage, staff would wait patiently on the sidelines until 2-3 days before a shift started - knowing that the urgency would result in higher incentives. Works OnDemand has completely changed this pattern due to automation of incentives and tiered visibility by workforce group. Today at SIH, a majority of shifts are claimed greater than 20 days before shift start.
Address a System-Wide Staffing Crisis While Reducing Labor Costs
Like many regional health systems, SIH faced a sustained staffing crisis due to regional competition for talent, and a finite pool of local clinicians typical for providers based in rural areas. Larger regional competitors have more resources to use compensation to lure away critical staff. The SIH executive team understood their limitations on constantly raising compensation and incentives, and so they decided to introduce a new dynamic to their retention and recruitment strategy: Flexibility.
The challenge lay in finding a solution that was easy to use for staff and could integrate with their existing, legacy Symplr API scheduling system - SIH was concerned that this could limit any automation benefits depending on vendor capability.
“We were excited to find from our research that the
vendor with the strongest references and capabilities
was also unique in their ability to work within our
legacy scheduling environment. This helped us give
new lift to our old system, and we got the solution we
wanted without the large expense of a scheduling
system replacement.”
Johnna Smith
Chief Nurse Executive
SIH St. Joseph Memorial Hospital
An AI-Driven Internal Open Shift Marketplace
To initiate the project, SIH chose to pilot Works using their existing internal float pool. This change to the float pool, powered by Works, gave staff visibility into shifts across all facilities, allowing them to easily pick up shifts that worked best for their personal schedule.
What SIH saw by offering this flexibility was:
1. Clinicians were highly engaged and rejoiced in the reduction in coverage requests.
2. Ease of use was a critical factor, with nurses quickly adopting the Works mobile app to claim shifts.
3. Early adopters became champions as SIH scaled Works to inpatient and emergency department units.
4. After deploying Works to the entire Nursing team, staff quickly began claiming shifts across units and facilities - greatly increasing the pool of potential staff.
Clinician feedback was clear - the Works platform opened up earning opportunities that better met staff demands, while in turn driving up fill rates in high-priority units.
Expansion Across Additional Clinical Disciplines
Following the successful pilot period, SIH opened up access to all Nursing roles across the enterprise. The implementation has since been expanded to include many critical allied health roles and departments, including Imaging, Respiratory Therapy, Telemetry Techs, Patient Care Techs, Cath Lab, Patient Intake and Transport.
$2M+ in net labor cost savings
20% increase in clinical staff engagement scores
20+ days average time between shift claim and shift start - breaking the "Wait and Negotiate" cycle that led to higher premium labor costs
“This was by far the best technology rollout I've been a part of. Having a successful focus on staff education, and getting support from the Works pilot team coming on-site, has allowed us to achieve an 83% adoption rate that speaks volumes about ease of use."
Katie Albon
System Staffing & Float Pool Supervisor
Resource Management Center
Works OnDemand served as a critical innovation for Southern Illinois Healthcare in a time of crisis - enabling the health system to drastically improve staff engagement and retention and keep inpatient beds open despite a finite local supply of clinicians.
Since its launch, Works OnDemand has expanded impact beyond Nursing, and now facilitates shift coverage across 1,000+ staff members - nursing, allied and non-clinical included. Higher fill rates and lower labor spend have been achieved without additional hiring within the central staffing team, and frontline managers benefit from additional time to spend on patient care, process improvement and staff development.
The SIH and Works teams were able to achieve all of this despite the limited integration capabilities of the legacy Symplr API scheduling platform used by the health system. Works OnDemand has delivered value on many fronts - and allowed the SIH team to extend the life and value of their scheduling platform as well.
