The nurse-patient assignment process for infusion centers is a critical component of patient care. However, the manual assignment methods used at most infusion centers are inefficient, add administrative strain to already overburdened nurses’ workloads and threaten nurse retention.
During a May Becker’s Hospital Review webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, Valeria Campbell, MSN, RN, OCN, NE-BC, director of clinical services and clinical research at Regional Cancer Center, Lee Health Cancer Institute (Fort Myers, Fla.), discussed how adopting LeanTaaS’ iQueue for Infusion Centers helped her organization improve nurse satisfaction while tackling multiple operational and nursing challenges.
Four key insights were:
- Lee Health faced multiple operational and nursing challenges in its infusion centers. On the operational side, challenges included not making full use of infusion chairs and operating hours due to sub-optimal setting of appointments, as well as bottlenecks for nursing and pharmacy due to overbooking appointments in the morning hours. Despite continuous efforts to address those challenges, Ms. Campbell’s team was hamstrung by inefficient scheduling practices based on “pods” (groups of four chairs, each chair assigned one hour apart) and due to scheduling templates that were built using historical data rather than real-time utilization data.
On the nursing side, challenges included low visibility into staffing levels and low productivity due to lack of data, nurses foregoing lunches due to overlapping clinical and pharmacy workflows and excessive hours spent balancing the next day’s assignments. “My charge nurse would spend the entire shift balancing the schedule,” Ms. Campbell said. “It was like a Sudoku.”
- Solving Lee Health’s scheduling problem required using duration-based templates. In the fall of 2023, Lee Health partnered with LeanTaaS to implement iQueue for Infusion Centers. The Patient Assignment tool — a component of iQueue — leverages real-time data and predictive AI to develop scheduling templates adapted to an infusion facility’s probable chair utilization and nurse availability. Lee Health went live with the tool a few months after implementing iQueue.
“The Patient Assignment tool was an absolute godsend,” Ms. Campbell said. The tool’s value lies in its generation of an adaptive scheduling template based on actual infusion durations, nurse availability and fluctuating staffing needs at a given facility.
“Now we have this adaptive template that tells us, ‘Here’s what you need [to schedule] if you have two nurses.’ But if it comes to a point where we may need a third nurse, the scheduler already has a background template to say, ‘This is where I can put it now,’” she explained.
- The results of implementing iQueue and Patient Assignment were remarkable. After launching iQueue, Lee Health saw significant operational improvements in Q1 2024 compared to the same period a year earlier. These improvements included a 2.9% increase in completed patient appointments, a 1.2% decrease in no-shows and same-day cancellations and a stabilized 4-minute patient wait time for infusions. These improvements were largely due to better utilization of morning hours and a smoother ramp-up to peak hours. “Before, at 9 o’clock we only had 10-12 patients in the chair, but now we have about 20, just by changing our scheduling a little bit,” Ms. Campbell said.
Implementing the Patient Assignment tool led to further improvements in terms of balancing nurse workloads and increasing nurse satisfaction. Those improvements included a 10% reduction in nurse workload imbalances and an 11% increase in productivity and autonomy gains, with 90% of nurses now able to self-manage their patient load. In addition, Lee Health reports a 100% satisfaction score from nurses specific to patient assignment.
“The nurses are able to pull patients when they are ready rather than being told, ‘It’s time to take a patient because it’s the hour that you’re supposed to take a patient,’” Ms. Campbell said, referring to the legacy scheduling system. This newfound autonomy was such an important aspect of nurses’ daily work that in an internal survey, all nurses at Lee Health’s facilities that implemented the Patient Assignment tool expressed satisfaction with it.
- Nursing leaders feel the impact of smart patient assignment, too. The tool’s real-time data curation and visualizations allow supervisors to know how things are going on the clinic floor and whether their teams need help or run into difficulties — all with a simple glance.
“This gives me a very in-depth view of what is happening in the clinic without me being down there,” Ms. Campbell said. “It pulls data that goes into a report that surfaces information I would have never seen without this tool.”
Please also check out our upcoming Virtual Summit: Transform Infusion Center Operations.
The post Improving nurse satisfaction at Lee Health: Leveraging data-driven patient assignments to achieve a 10% reduction in workload imbalances and an 11% increase in staff productivity appeared first on Becker’s ASC.
