The long-term care industry faces a persistent challenge: the staffing crunch. While the immediate focus is often on recruitment and retention, a deeper dive reveals significant "hidden drains" — inefficiencies and unnecessary costs that can quietly erode your facility's bottom line and can affect quality of care.
Smartlinx, in partnership with the Elder Care Network, recently hosted a webinar to shed light on these hidden costs and demonstrate how a specialized workforce management platform can offer a powerful solution. Here are some of the key takeaways from that webinar.
Beyond Payroll: The True Cost of Your Workforce
It's easy to focus solely on the weekly or bi-weekly payroll, but true labor costs extend far beyond that. As Matt Durgin, Senior Marketing Director at Smartlinx, highlighted, these are costs that can be addressed, making a meaningful impact on your financial health and allowing for reinvestment into your valuable full-time staff.
With Smartlinx’s 25 years of experience and our customer base of over 4,600 senior care facilities and 600,000 caregivers, we are uniquely positioned to understand these challenges. Our platform, purpose-built for long-term care, has allowed us to gather invaluable data on how operational efficiencies translate into real savings.
Unveiling the Compounding Hidden Costs
Our data reveals that inefficiencies are widespread and, more importantly, compounding. A problem in one area can cascade into others, amplifying costs. Consider these common hidden drains:
- Inefficient Scheduling: Manual or poorly organized scheduling can lead to overstaffing, unnecessary overtime, and compliance issues.
- Inaccurate Time & Attendance: Without proper systems, issues like early punching or buddy punching can quietly inflate wage costs.
- Excessive Overtime: A direct consequence of inefficient scheduling and staffing gaps.
- Agency Dependence: Relying heavily on external agencies to cover shifts is significantly more expensive than utilizing your in-house staff.
- High Turnover: The cost to recruit, onboard, and train a new employee is substantial, and high turnover repeatedly drains resources.
- PBJ Reporting Burdens: Manual or cumbersome reporting processes for Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) are time-consuming and prone to errors, potentially leading to costly penalties.
- Compromised Quality Ratings: Inefficiencies can ultimately impact your facility's CMS five-star rating, affecting reputation and potential revenue.
Real Savings, Real Impact
Our analysis of our workforce data demonstrates the tangible savings that can be achieved by workforce optimization. For a typical 100-bed skilled nursing facility, addressing these inefficiencies can lead to an average annual savings of almost $120,000!
These savings come from:
- Streamlined Scheduling: Reducing overstaffing by even one CNA shift per week can save approximately $7,100 annually.
- Accurate Time & Attendance: Eliminating early punching habits can save over $15,000 per year.
- Overtime and Agency Control: Reducing one CNA overtime shift per week or finding in-house coverage for one agency shift can save nearly $10,000 annually in each category.
- Reduced Turnover: Saving just one CNA per month from leaving can offset replacement costs of around $36,000 per year.
- Effortless PBJ Reporting: Automated reporting saves administrative time and reduces the risk of non-compliance penalties.
How to Achieve these Results
By using an integrated, workforce platform long-term care facilities can streamline operations, gain better visibility into their workforce, improve staff engagement and retention, automate manual tasks, and make better business decisions – ultimately saving them thousands per year. Here are some examples of how workforce technology can help to find and reduce these hidden costs:
- Unified Scheduling and Timekeeping: Consolidating these functions eliminates manual work, reduces administrative burden (saving potentially 520 hours annually), and ensures real-time accuracy, reducing the chances of time theft and buddy-punching.
- Census-Driven Scheduling: The scheduling system connects directly to census data, providing real-time visibility into overstaffing or understaffing based on actual patient needs, allowing for immediate course correction.
- Automated Open Shift Management: Quickly identifies open shifts and allows facilities to broadcast these openings to their full and part-time staff first, increasing engagement and reducing the need for agency staff.
- Intelligent Shift Filling: Provides a qualified, pre-sorted list of eligible employees to fill shifts based on availability, projected hours, overtime status, and even pay rate, ensuring the most cost-effective choice.
- Employee Self-Service (Smartlinx Go): A mobile app that empowers caregivers to view schedules, pick up shifts, and update availability, fostering better communication, flexibility and ultimately helping to improve retention.
The Virtuous Cycle of Investment
The most impactful aspect of these savings isn't just cutting costs, but the opportunity for reinvestment. By using an integrated workforce platform and reclaiming these hidden dollars, facilities can create a virtuous cycle, moving beyond merely meeting daily staff requirements to build a happy, stable, and highly productive workforce.
Want to learn more about how Smartlinx can help your facility uncover and address its hidden labor costs? You can request a personalized analysis of your operations to see the potential savings for your specific facility. Simply reach out to Smartlinx today!
