-
Saint Vincent Meets Health Care
- Administrative Challenges Head On
Hanford Bay
Associates helps to propel Saint Vincent
into the 21st century with upgrade from
SNAP to
iSNAP
It’s not very often an organization
remains loyal for 10-plus years to a
technology product, service or company.
With technology evolving by leaps and
bounds—sometimes over mere
months—staying put can mean getting
stagnant. But Saint Vincent Health
System saw things differently.
“The people at Hanford Bay remain
extremely responsive to our needs,” says
Mary Manross, an RN with Saint Vincent
Patient Care Services Administration,
who serves as Saint Vincent’s
iSNAP
application specialist. “We have enjoyed
a wonderful working relationship since
1992. Hanford Bay listens carefully and
allows us considerable input and voice
into software design. If we hadn’t
received the expert care and attention
we have over the years, we wouldn’t
still be working with them. I can’t
speak highly enough of the people at
Hanford Bay.”
Saint Vincent Health System, located
in Erie, Pa., is a multi-faceted network
of 26 health care facilities, including
a 489-bed teaching hospital, a 32-bed
rural hospital in western New York, 16
physician practice sites, six
rehabilitation outpatient rehabilitation
sites, home care and a free-standing
outpatient surgery center. Saint
Vincent provides a variety of health
care services including:
- rehabilitation
- mental health treatment
- global health care
- critical care
- maternal/child health
- surgical care
- cardiac care
- orthopedics
- oncology
- neurology
- nephrology
- urology
- women’s health care
In the
Beginning
In 1992, Saint Vincent set out to
implement a software system that would
primarily assist with scheduling as well
as time and attendance processing. The
hospital elected to work with Hanford
Bay Associates, Ltd. of Amherst, NY. The
hospital and the software company worked
as a team to implement Hanford Bay’s
SNAP solution. SNAP was Hanford Bay’s
original Oracle-based product providing
hospitals with the technology to
generate staff schedules, manage time
and attendance information, track
benefits and maintain decision support
information to meet daily staffing
requirements. SNAP fulfilled the
hospital’s unique need for decentralized
scheduling while allowing for
centralized staffing.
When Saint Vincent replaced an
existing scheduling package with SNAP 10
years ago, the goal was to streamline
administrative activity, reducing
leadership’s level of involvement in
scheduling and payroll tasks. SNAP was
especially beneficial during a
re-organization at Saint Vincent when
many leaders were asked to assume
responsibility for additional
departments. In 1996, Saint Vincent
looked to benefit further from SNAP by
implementing time and attendance data
collection and automated payroll
features.
With 51 Patient Care Services cost
centers, it was crucial for Saint
Vincent to address the amount of time
spent on scheduling, logging and
reporting data and other administrative
tasks. SNAP’s ability to address each
unit’s uniqueness proved to be critical
to a successful implementation. When
minor modifications were required,
Hanford Bay was able to respond quickly
to meet Saint Vincent’s specific needs.
“Our initial implementation of
SNAP
allowed us to save substantial time
developing schedules and producing
payroll, as well as many other
benefits,” comments Bonnie Prokocki,
manager of Patient Care Services
Administration. “We went from spending
five to eight hours every other week on
payroll to only a few minutes each day.
This saved us time, but more
importantly, we became much more
efficient using SNAP. We have more time
for our primary tasks directed toward
high-quality patient care.”
A Decade Later …
From SNAP to
iSNAP
Saint Vincent implemented the
iSNAP
(intuitive Staffing Needs and Planning)
solution in July 2002 in their 489-bed
health center and is now rolling out
iSNAP into additional facilities.
iSNAP
is Hanford Bay’s substantially enhanced
Web-based solution, providing
comprehensive staff scheduling, planning
and management for hospitals, extended
care facilities, airports and other
human resources intensive and critical
delivery environments.
Saint Vincent Health Center and the
hospital’s free-standing surgery center
are both running live on
iSNAP. Today,
more than 1,900 associates are using
iSNAP. Four additional Saint Vincent
affiliates will come up by the end of
2003, bringing their total number of
users to 2,500. Two affiliate facilities
will be added to
iSNAP early next year.
Saint Vincent has also elected to
integrate iSNAPP with Lawson human
resources and payroll systems.
Basically,
iSNAP works between Lawson’s
HR and payroll systems. Saint Vincent
updates
iSNAP with associate schedule
information, which is adjusted daily and
by shift, to reflect when the
associates actually worked. This ensures
that appropriate staffing is maintained,
and thereafter used as input for
payroll. With the interface, Saint
Vincent can import into iSNAP daily
demographic information and export
bi-weekly schedule information that is
then utilized as input to payroll. With
this automated, flexible process,
manual time cards are only a bad
memory. The updated
iSNAP data is then
validated and passed off to the Lawson
system for payroll processing.
“Our HR/Payroll interface has been a
real time saver as well as an efficient
time manager,” notes Manross. “We
perform daily adjustments for Payroll
and, on ‘Payroll Monday,’ each
department just makes adjustments for
the weekend and then validates the
changes. What used to be a six to eight
hour job for our 24/7 clinical
departments is now only an hour process
each Monday, after each department,
depending on size, spends a few minutes
each day for updates. With this powerful
combination, we have accurate,
up-to-date information readily available
throughout our organization.”
A Jump in Speed
and Ease of Use
“While we were happy with
SNAP,
demands from the hospital required us to
look at even faster processing,” notes Manross. “We found iSNAP to be
significantly faster in processing
payroll, schedules and other
administrative functions. We are also
very pleased with the reduction in
iSNAP
training time. We went from 16 to 20
hours of training users on SNAP to only
one to two hours with
iSNAP.
iSNAP is
extremely easy to learn and very user
friendly.”
In their feedback to administrative
managers,
iSNAP users continue to relay
positive comments about the significant
decrease in payroll processing time.
Users can make daily changes for
multiple cost centers in minutes.
Wrapping up payroll validation is
accomplished in less than one hour.
Staff
Involvement, Custom Reporting Remain
High Priority
Saint Vincent relies heavily on
iSNAP
to track time and attendance after the
scheduling process. Staff can pull
several different types of reports using
iSNAP’s very powerful, user friendly and
unique “filters.” Additional detailed
reports can be generated using “ad hoc”
reports or Crystal Reports, a report
writer integrated with iSNAP. Soon
Saint Vincent will make custom reports
available on the
iSNAP menu for access
by all users. As Saint Vincent becomes
more proficient with Crystal Enterprise,
they expect to be able to provide
virtually any report that is requested,
tailored specifically to the users’
request.
Since implementing
iSNAP, Saint
Vincent has moved all data entry to the
clerical level. The only involvement by
department leaders is to approve the
schedule, validate payroll and
eventually sign off for the submission
of input to Payroll. Saint Vincent does
not involve staff-level users for data
entry. Staff members are responsible for
indicating schedule changes such as sick
calls, overtime or arriving late on
preprinted “exception logs” that are
generated from the
iSNAP schedule. The
clerical data entry employee enters
those changes into
iSNAP for input to
Payroll and tracking purposes. This
simplified and straightforward routine
allows for more accurate time tracking,
utilizing clerical level employees for
data entry, while insuring that staffing
needs are also being appropriately met.
For the
iSNAP implementation, Saint
Vincent migrated from an HP-UX and
Oracle 7 platform to a Windows NT Oracle
8i platform. They also replaced the
report writer with Crystal Enterprise
Reports.
”From our initial
SNAP implementation
in 1992 to the additional
iSNAP
affiliates we’ll be adding later this
year, Hanford Bay has allowed us to
maintain our high standard of efficiency
as well as our high standard of patient
care,” concludes Manross. “Hanford Bay’s
exceptional support and technical
expertise is highly valued by our entire
organization. The system has paid for
itself many times over.”
(Document
Authored Sept 2002) |
