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Kronos^® for Healthcare Gives Southern Cross Hospitals the Time to Plan Ahead

Southern Cross Hospitals is New Zealand’s largest private employer of registered nurses. The not-for-profit organisation was established in 1979 and now boasts 11 hospitals around the country and more than 1,000 staff. Over 800 specialist surgeons perform more than 50,000 procedures each year. Southern Cross Hospitals strives to be a leader in New Zealand healthcare through innovative service delivery and technology use.

Southern Cross Hospitals implemented Kronos for Healthcare across all 11 hospitals to streamline its workforce management processes.

Paper time sheets prone to errors

With a large proportion of its staff working shifts, Southern Cross Hospitals aims to provide a flexible and family-friendly work environment for employees as well as the highest quality care for patients. To ensure adequate staffing levels and provide the best workplace environment for nursing staff, the hospital network needs powerful rostering capabilities.

"The more intelligent and flexible we can be about rostering, the happier our staff are," says Ann Browett. "And the faster and more accurately we can manage payroll and rostering, the happier the board are."

However, its manual, paper-based time sheet system was not making this an easy task. In addition, the payroll system did not provide sufficient data or tools to analyse workforce trends or make intelligent decisions about rostering.

"Staff would fill in paper time sheets, which were sent to a central office where the HR department would manually enter them into the payroll system," says Ann Browett, IS Project Analyst at Southern Cross Hospitals. "This process was time consuming and error prone and it was quite common for staff to dispute inaccuracies in their pay."

Southern Cross Hospitals wanted to minimise this effort and manual data entry required to manage payroll.

Kronos for Healthcare automates time and attendance

After formally evaluating a number of options, Southern Cross Hospitals first implemented Kronos Workforce Central in 2002. In July 2005, the group went to the market looking to upgrade its workforce management capabilities and once again Kronos quickly emerged as the best option for its next generation Kronos for Healthcare Solution.

Kronos for Healthcare automatically calculates time and attendance data from terminals at each hospital where staff enter their personal identification numbers at the start and end of each shift. This data is collated and presented to unit managers using a web interface. Managers can review and update time card information and sign it off at the end of each pay period.

"The portal gives each unit manager the information specific to them and their staff," says Browett. "Hospital managers can see overviews and trends across entire cost centres and groups of people. This data gives them the ability to roster staff more efficiently and gives us greater flexibility to accommodate people who have kids to pick up or other constraints on their time."

Southern Cross Hospitals used Kronos Workforce Connect to integrate with its existing payroll system. Workforce Connect is an easy-to-use, flexible data integration tool that efficiently interfaces Kronos's products with other critical business applications. Kronos Connect uses proven technologies to transfer data to and from common payroll applications, enterprise resource planning systems, and human resources management systems.

Powerful reporting for trend analysis

Kronos for Healthcare gives Southern Cross Hospitals powerful real-time reporting capabilities that allow the organisation to analyse workforce trends and make better rostering and staffing decisions that ultimately lead to improved patient care.

"Kronos for Healthcare has given us much greater insight into broader trends such as our overall leave liability or the number of staff working overtime or on night shifts," says Browett. "People are becoming much more aware of what the system can do and are starting to change the way they do things as a result of the information they can now work with."

"For example, it allows hospital managers to make better rostering decisions that help them control their costs. It also helps us ensure staff aren't overstretched or working too many long shifts, which increases the quality of patient care."

Faster, more accurate pay processing

Automating time and attendance calculations with Kronos Workforce Central has dramatically reduced the amount of time unit managers and HR office staff spend on the basic task of ensuring staff get paid, giving them more time to devote to higher-level tasks.

"Our unit managers tell us they can review and update time cards at the end of a pay period in 15 minutes, where it used to take them two or three hours," says Browett.

"The data is more accurate, which means the pay office receives fewer calls and doesn't have to make as many adjustments. "The system records the entire process for us, including who made adjustments and when. This gives us an audit trail if we need one and helps us make sure we follow best practices."

Leading technology with top-notch support

Southern Cross Hospitals staff has quickly taken to the new system, thanks to its intuitive web interface.

"Because it's a web-based application rather than client-based, that means less administration work for the IT people," says Browett. "Most people picked it up almost immediately because they were already familiar with web- based applications. This also minimises the amount and cost of traffic over our wide-area network, which connects all our facilities across both islands of New Zealand."

Kronos provided a senior consultant to work with Southern Cross Hospitals throughout the implementation process and has continued to support the healthcare provider since.

"Kronos worked with us directly to develop a project plan, configure the new application, interface it with our payroll system and provide training and documentation for end users," says Browett. "They also helped migrate our historical data from the older version, which is vital for doing long-term and historical analysis of workforce trends."

"We had a really short time frame for the implementation, but it came in on time and under budget."

Moving towards comprehensive workforce management

Southern Cross Hospitals plans to implement Kronos's advanced rostering options, to provide greater visibility into, and control over, available resources. The implementation of the advanced rostering capabilities central to the Kronos for Healthcare workforce management solution will help the organisation deploy staff more cost effectively minimising the use of agency staff whilst contributing to the delivering of quality patient care.

"We are looking for Kronos for Healthcare to be a one-stop shop for time and rostering," says Browett. "We will be able to do forward planning and compare what was rostered with what actually happened. The complete utilisation of the Kronos for Healthcare workforce management suite will enable us to make more intelligent rostering decisions using flexible rostering methodologies which will also help us achieve greater work-life balance for our employees and therefore keep staff happier."

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