Many of the onerous regulatory concerns of employers are triggered when certain FTE thresholds are met. The ObamaCare legislation for employers is triggered by one set of FTE rules, but execution of penalties or (taxes) is dependent on another set of FTE calculations. It is not unusual in heavily regulated industries to attempt to remain under certain thresholds to eliminate the costly compliance of attendant regulations.
Although success in the healthcare staffing industry is measured by number of hours profitably billed, or rather a cumulative figure for billed FTE’s, keeping employee count low is counter-intuitive in the staffing industry. With that said, it still makes sense to keep operational staff at the lowest possible levels without sacrificing sales, service or support.
One of the greatest areas of employee “bloat” is data entry. The heaviest item in healthcare staffing for data entry are recording time and attendance. Although paper time sheets still dominate much of the healthcare staffing industry, there are alternatives available.
Hospitals today have implemented digital time and attendance record keeping systems. These systems use a variety of entry and exit procedures, included but not limited to badges, phone access, local computer access, or electronic keys. The ability to “capture” this data electronically for the staffing firm can be one of the greatest time savers for any staffing firms operations.
If the physical requirements can be met by the temporary healthcare staff logging in, the digital portion can easily by pulled out. Most time and attendance systems have the capacity to apportion that data and separate it into a separate batch file. Once separated, it can be passed on to the healthcare staffing firm(s) electronically as a spreadsheet or CSV file. Utilizing the import module in the healthcare staffing software can automatically populate ever shift, every employee and every pay and bill rate. If you haven’t investigated this with your clients, it’s worth a try.
Remember the important feature for the hospital is they get real time reporting for cost of labor.
