The pandemic — and the persistent staffing challenges that have come with it — have hit long-term care harder than most industries.
As more than a half-million nurses have left long-term care since 2020, wage rates have skyrocketed in response to the constrained supply. Yet reimbursement has remained stagnant, leaving facilities desperate for full-time staff and for wage rates to return to pre-pandemic norms.
With higher wages as the new normal and nearly half of the long-term care nursing workforce looking to make a permanent change to a flexible role, skilled nursing facility leaders are setting the path for their next moves. They need to determine how to get the staff needed to take on referrals, improve quality of care and drive more revenue and reimbursement.
Their answer is simple: build a more balanced workforce and manage it with the right technology.
Planning the perfect staffing mix
While SNF operators have little control over nursing wage rates and reimbursement, they can control staffing levels and better manage costs by planning ahead.
It is obvious why health care facilities want to hire more nurses as full-time staff. The inability to control and manage the costs of per diem nurses can cause a lot of anxiety. And with the government adding regulations and becoming more punitive — without providing more reimbursement — the pressure on long-term care is mounting.
SNFs, therefore, face an important question: How can they create a staffing mix that empowers them with more control over the cost, training and quality of care that their nurses provide? The first step is to build a PRN pool to set up their own in-house, flexible workforce that they hire and manage directly.
By offering flexible staffing to nurses who want it, SNFs can attract and retain more staff and reduce per diem use, allowing them to increase the control of their workforce to over 90%.
How IntelyCare Can Help SNFs Reduce Agency Use
You’re probably wondering why IntelyCare is advocating for facilities to use less per diem staff. For starters, the company is not an agency. IntelyCare is a workforce management provider, and its goal has always been to enable its clients to achieve their staffing goals — even if it means reducing per diem usage.
The way IntelyCare views it, they are only as successful as their clients. With vacations, holidays, kids going back to school and seasonal sickness, there will always be a need for per diem to fill in gaps in a SNF’s schedule. The key is making those needs more predictable and balanced.
Quickly reacting to cyclical events instead of planning for them as part of a long-term strategy is more expensive. If you can normalize the use of per diem, you can more easily avoid burst costs, maintain consistent staffing levels in your facilities and reduce the anxiety of complying with evolving CMS regulations.
To do this successfully, you must also build a PRN pool. If you’ve had a painful PRN experience in the past, IntelyCare can help. Its platform lets SNFs:
- eliminate silos by creating a central PRN pool
- make more informed scheduling decisions with predictive algorithms
- better manage staffing costs with intelligent incentives
All of this helps SNFs stay within their budget and optimize for maximum fill. IntelyCare helps SNFs take control of over 90% of their workforce, reducing the use of per diem in staffing mix to under 10%.
This article is sponsored by IntelyCare. To learn how to use IntelyCare technology to create and manage a PRN pool that will supplement your full-time staff, visit IntelyCare.com.
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