Analytics Improves COVID-19 Workforce Management

THE CHALLENGE

Allina Health faced new staffing challenges with COVID-19. The organization needed to ensure it had adequate staffing to meet patient needs while also managing the safety and availability of its workforce. Allina Health developed a spreadsheet to track staffing data, but multiple editors frequently over-wrote one another, and the spreadsheet grew to be so large it would routinely force-close and was quickly corrupted. The organization recognized that valuable time was being wasted recreating spreadsheets and performing burdensome manual data entry.

THE PROJECT

Allina Health leveraged the Health Catalyst® Data Operating System (DOS™) platform, IDEA™, and COVID-19 dashboard to capture, monitor, and report critical staffing and employee health data.

Multiple users can enter data into IDEA, a self-service data entry tool, concurrently without over-writing one another. The staffing data entered in IDEA flows directly into DOS and is sent back to the EMR for visualization. Allina Health uses the COVID-19 dashboard to monitor and visualize the number of staff exposed to COVID-19, the number of staff in quarantine, and the number of staff available for scheduling. The dashboard also provides timely access to COVID-19 test results for employees.

Allina Health uses the dashboard to ensure accurate schedules and predictive staffing levels by providing up-to-date information on employee leave status and ensure accurate pay for employees on COVID-19 leave.

THE RESULT

DOS, IDEA, and the COVID-19 dashboard improved the management of COVID-19 workforce exposures, providing Allina Health the timely data required to guide key strategic decisions for return-to-work policies and procedures. The data helped inform the Board, executive team, and care teams about the state of Allina’s workforce and identified areas where there were staffing concerns due to COVID-19.

• Integrated COVID-19 surveillance data for more than 28,000 employees.
• Effectively managed the workforce in relation to demand and available resources.
• >$100K indirect labor cost savings, the result of automating staff exposure data, enabling the development of accurate schedules.

ADDITIONAL READING

• Analytics Improves Management of Workforce COVID-19 Immunization Registry
• Integrated Data and Analytics Critical for COVID-19 Response and Recovery Planning
• Analytics Enables Robust COVID-19 Patient and Staff Contact Tracing
• The Fight Against COVID-19: A National Patient Registry
• Why Data-Driven Healthcare Is the Best Defense Against COVID-19