When people’s health and care are on the line, leaving operations to a guess simply isn’t acceptable. Planning is essential, and so is making sure sufficient staffing resources and materials are available and on-hand to get the job done right. Even then, with an extensive amount of training and foresight, things will still go wrong, but planning also builds in contingencies for these situations as well. No surprise then, nurse assignment allocations in the medical environment are a key factor in support and technical resource availability, whether it be an emergency room, intensive care, or general medical care on a regular day shift.
Nurse Allocation With Infusion Centers
Cancer clinics have it particularly challenging as much of their work involves treatment and processes that absolutely demand and require the presence of professional nursing staff on hand. These infusion centers make the difference in whether someone survives cancer or is ultimately killed due to a delay in receiving appropriate treatment in a timely manner. As a result, infusions centers have an extremely low tolerance for staff assignment slippage and a lack of availability of trained nurses.
It is quite common for an assigned infusion nurse to manage up to 15 patients in a day. Many nurses compare infusions centers to working in a military field hospital. There is never downtime, and nursing nurses coming on shift already see a backlog they have to deal with waiting for them coming in the door. Add in poor prep work, and their assignments take even longer to administer, making the demand worse by the hour.
Bad Assignments Carry Forward
Unlike other lines of work, a bad day doesn’t stay isolated in that 10 or twelve-hour shift for infusion center nurses. It can carry over to the rest of the week. Patients who missed their treatment slot show up the next day, adding to the backlog there too. No surprise, overtime shift costs go through the roof for infusion center operations, and even the best of nurses get burned out and eventually quit to find greener and calmer pastures elsewhere.
Better Planning of Work Schedules is Key
Most infusion center managers and administrators can already read the writing on the wall; better planning is critical to containing labor costs and creating a better work life for the nurses that need to be retained. But how does that planning happen when the supervisor is just as hammered as the staff, jumping from one trench to the next every day to manage crises?
A number of infusion centers are realizing artificial intelligence planning tools are becoming their best friend. AI can be programmed to understand the factors of every nuance and shift and patient time and, in a formulaic manner, objectively plan out the best allocation of available resources on every shift, every day. Using AI for nurse scheduling produces real benefits including:
- A far more distributed and equal workload plan
- Less chaos and more predictability to the workday
- Less conflict with fellow staff arguing over what’s next who gets what patient
- Better focus on patient care and load-balancing through all available staff, which in turn produces more timely service for patients
- Adjusting and flexing automatically to assignment changes so that the team doesn’t fall behind
Infusion center scheduling software can also be expanded to both monthly short-term and long-term labor resource management needs once the daily cycle is stabilized. Because the elements of the tool can be tailored to the patient type profiles and nurse capabilities of a unique and specific center, the assignment output from such a tool adjusts to the nuances of that facility.
Instead of struggling to match a generic assignment output to actual center situations, an AI approach continues to learn and become better over time in understanding the details of how different cases and nurses work. In short, the tool can provide a full-time resource planner for a center that doesn’t rest, doesn’t stop analyzing, and continues to improve nurse assignments over time. Centers that have tried the approach have found it dramatically changing their work conditions as well as cash flow for the positive.
