Month: April 2023

By Mackin Bannon
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May 3, 2023

Staffing is the biggest problem labs are facing today. Between fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Great Resignation and a decline in laboratory training programs, there is a significant shortage of laboratory professionals. In fact, a recent survey uncovered that 73 percent of respondents indicated their laboratories were understaffed. 

As lab professionals are being asked to do more with less, there are several risks. When lab departments are understaffed, it can lead to missed benchmarks and increased turnaround time. Additionally, understaffing can lead to burnout and the loss of even more resources – 85.3% of respondents to a survey by the American Society for Clinical Pathology reported having felt burnout as a laboratory professional.

Given the high stakes, it’s critical that laboratories ease the burden on their staff in the face of today’s labor shortages. Here are three steps labs can take to optimize their staffing.

1. Leverage timekeeping data to better understand staffing

The first step is to take a deeper dive into your lab’s timekeeping data. Looking at your staffing levels at particular times of day and days of the week, as well as seasonally, will help you gain a better understanding of your workforce. Maybe you need to shift some staff from one shift to another, or you need to hire additional staff during particular seasons you know are busier. Certain departments may be short-staffed, while others have more than enough staff.

2. Gain a clear picture of lab volume trends

It’s also important to look at volume trends. Similar to the review of staffing levels, look at your volume during particular times of day, on each day of the week and seasonally. Are your volumes lower in the morning but spiking in the afternoon? Are you busier on certain days of the week? Additionally, break down your volume by department to look for further trends. Does your molecular testing skyrocket during flu season? Do anatomic pathology tests tend to come in early or late in the week?

3. Connect staffing data with volume data to optimize staffing

The final step is to combine all this data and its insights to identify opportunities to optimize staffing. By bringing timekeeping and lab testing data together, you can ensure that you have the right amount of staff to cover the volume of tests coming into your lab.

For example, you may find that test volumes are typically higher on Saturdays, but your staffing levels are typically lower. You may need to incentivize more staff to work Saturdays so that you can ensure turnaround times do not suffer.

Maybe you’ve seen volumes decrease over the last couple of months in a specific department – possibly due to the loss of some key accounts – but staffing levels have remained the same. Instead of continuing on with more staff than is needed, you could train and reassign some individuals to another department that is short-staffed.

Making the Connection

While this may sound like a great way for laboratories to address labor shortages, with current lab technology it is a difficult and time-consuming process. Since timekeeping software and lab information systems don’t typically interface with one another, labs are left to manually download, compile and sift through the data looking for insights, a process that lab leaders don’t have time for.

For this reason, hc1 is developing a new solution to connect timekeeping data with lab testing data to optimize staffing based on volume by department.

hc1 Workforce Optimization™ will leverage historical data, real-time trends and AI to forecast lab volume and provide staffing recommendations in a near-turnkey solution, ensuring lab departments and teams are adequately staffed based on their expected workload.

hc1 is offering a limited opportunity to be one of the first to obtain hc1 Workforce Optimization and experience its benefits. Request a demo today to learn more.

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Mackin Bannon is the product marketing manager for hc1. Mackin held a variety of roles covering nearly every area of marketing before settling on product marketing as a focus and joining hc1 in 2022. During the workday, he enjoys bringing stories to life in clear and creative ways, and in his free time, he enjoys following his favorite sports teams, collecting vinyl records and exploring Indianapolis.

By Mackin Bannon
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June 7, 2023

When critical and urgent test result notifications are needed, speed, organization and efficiency are essential. Ensuring providers receive timely notification of results enables the patient to receive immediate and appropriate care. It also helps the lab meet service-level agreements and maintain strong relationships with providers.

However, critical and urgent notifications do not come without significant effort and coordination by the lab. Failure to notify providers in a timely fashion can lead to diagnostic errors, missed treatment and liability claims. The key for labs to avoid these pitfalls is collaboration across teams and departments.

Collaborating to ensure critical and urgent results are identified

First and foremost, it’s critical that staff across the lab—technicians, analysts, service reps, etc. are aware of the critical and urgent thresholds. Ideally, technology will be in place to trigger and alert when a test result crosses these thresholds and all appropriate staff will be notified. This ensures that critical and urgent results are not missed.

Collaborating to ensure the right staff have the right information

It’s equally important that teams collaborate across departments to ensure the right staff has the right information to notify providers of the results. The handoff of information as fast as possible from the technician or analyst that ran the sample to the service rep or individual responsible for contacting the provider is of the utmost importance. Again, technology that triggers a notification or creates a case for the service rep can ensure that critical and urgent results are acted on quickly.

Collaborating to ensure providers are notified in a timely manner

Lastly, it’s critical for the team communicating results to providers to have protocols and processes in place for collaboration. There should be a methodology for assigning result notifications to individual team members or allowing them to claim them as they come in. Collaborating and communicating within the team ensures that no one team member has too many calls on their plate and that the highest-priority results are handled first. Technology can help automate this process and take the burden off team members and managers.

Technology to help foster collaboration

We’ve seen how important cross-departmental collaboration is to ensuring providers receive timely notification of critical and urgent results. However, many labs still rely on manual processes, making it difficult to assign ownership and take action in a timely manner. Additionally, with processes and documentation often varying between different individuals and teams, it is hard to ensure a consistent and standardized response. Ultimately, delayed action on time-sensitive results impacts patient outcomes and provider satisfaction.

hc1 offers technology to help labs collaborate more effectively and take immediate action on critical and urgent test results.

hc1 Rapid Response Queue™ generates and prioritizes automated workflows based on clinical results and information pulled directly from the EMR or LIS, enabling teams to collaborate with real-time visibility and clear ownership of time-sensitive notifications. This enables labs to create a standardized process for critical and urgent result notifications, ensure required information is captured and documented, and help create positive patient outcomes when minutes matter.

Are you ready to enhance your critical and urgent workflows across departments? Request a demo today.

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Mackin Bannon is the product marketing manager for hc1. Mackin held a variety of roles covering nearly every area of marketing before settling on product marketing as a focus and joining hc1 in 2022. During the workday, he enjoys bringing stories to life in clear and creative ways, and in his free time, he enjoys following his favorite sports teams, collecting vinyl records and exploring Indianapolis.

By Heather Stith
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April 19, 2023

Way past 5 o’clock at hc1 headquarters the night before the launch, hc1 Director of Client Enablement Maura Lee and hc1 Client Coordinator Alyssa Castille are laughing hysterically, and I’m feeling pretty slaphappy, too. We decide it’s time to stop tinkering with hc1 Academy, the customer education platform project we’ve been working on for months and head home. On launch day, we hosted webinars introducing the revamped platform and received positive responses from customers and internal users. Success! But getting to this point was a challenge.

The hc1 Technology department follows an Agile scrum process to develop software, where each scrum team plans the deliverable work it can accomplish in a two-week timeframe, called a “sprint.” The scrum master leads short daily meetings (stand-ups) to uncover obstacles and keep the team on track. At the end of the sprint, the team shows their work to everyone and then holds a closed meeting, called a retrospective, to openly discuss what went well, what problems occurred and what improvements could be made. This process serves to reduce risk by breaking down bigger projects into smaller tasks and provides the flexibility to incorporate feedback and adapt to changing circumstances.

The hc1 Client Success team’s process in developing the new hc1 Academy was more ad hoc than Agile, but we did borrow the idea of a retrospective to wrap up the project after launch. Here’s what we learned. 

Measuring Success

Last year, Maura was looking to strengthen the customer focus of the learning management platform she used to deliver product training:

  • Instead of relying on email campaigns, she wanted an interactive webinar registration process, with customers choosing the topics that interested them. 
  • She wanted to build a certification process to document customers’ level of expertise with the hc1 Platform.
  • She wanted to tailor the learning management platform to serve the needs of all customers, from prospects to partners, from seasoned system administrators to new users.

Around the same time, as senior technical writer, I was investigating options to replace the online help platform, because it wasn’t going to be supported for much longer. Also, customers and internal users had provided feedback indicating that finding the information they were looking for was difficult. I wanted the new platform to be more visually appealing and have a variety of ways to boost relevant content to users. I also wanted users to have an easy way to provide feedback on content, so I could make meaningful revisions quicker. Having all client training and customer-facing product documentation in one spot would be more convenient for both hc1 customers and the hc1 Technology team, so Maura and I decided to join forces.

The launch of the new and improved hc1 Academy achieved these defined goals and gained a few unexpected benefits:

  • We made our team more resilient. Before this project, Maura and I were the only administrators and subject matter experts for our respective platforms. Now, we, along with Alyssa, can together help maintain content and troubleshoot issues more efficiently.
  • We collaborated in new ways. In our day-to-day roles, our team is typically the one helping other teams achieve their goals by documenting, building training for, or communicating with clients about the work being done. This time, we were the ones driving the process, assigning the work and meeting with internal stakeholders. We had to make sure our user interface changes were approved by the product team and assigned to a technology sprint. We tapped into marketing’s design expertise to make sure the new hc1 Academy was both user-friendly and appropriately branded. We recruited coworkers to run through our user testing plans. We gained a new appreciation for the multiple talents throughout hc1.

Facing the Problems

The first few meetings with our learning management platform vendor representatives did not go well. The level of guidance we had anticipated from them was not what they were set up to deliver. After much frustration, we had to pause the project for several months and regroup. When we restarted it, we knew we had to drive the process and be much more specific about what the project needed to make the most of our professional services time.

One important change we made was that we stopped trying to share project management tasks. We put Alyssa in charge of communicating with the vendor, keeping our project meetings on track and following up on issues. This change allowed Maura and me to focus on building content.

In addition to facing the external challenges of working with an outside vendor, the team faced some internal challenges. I knew this project would require me to add to my technical skills because I had to learn how to use the learning management platform. What I wasn’t anticipating was the need to improve my interpersonal skills. I was surprised at my defensiveness when it came to suggestions about how to organize the knowledge base content I had spent years maintaining on my own. I had to step back and remind myself about what the team as a whole was trying to achieve.

Looking Back to Move Forward

hc1 is all about actionable insights, which means that we provide data to our clients in a way that they can easily use it to improve healthcare delivery. Likewise, the value of a retrospective isn’t just to document work—it’s meant to provide a path for continuous improvement. 

As anyone who’s responsible for a customer education platform knows, it is a project that never ends. There’s always something that needs to be added, removed or improved upon. But the lessons learned from the recently launched hc1 Academy project have applications for other areas of work our team does as well, such as:

  • Making sure we are aligned with our customers. We can’t assume that we have the same expectations or information as they do going into a project.
  • Allowing time for learning. Curiosity is one of hc1’s core values for a reason. Every project offers an opportunity to learn something new.
  • Documenting our process. No surprise, the tech writer thinks there should be more documentation. But when I was in the throes of doing the work for this project, even I had to remind myself to stop and jot down a note or two about the decisions I was making to share with the rest of the team. Good documentation helps teams function better.

To learn more about how hc1 Executive Director of Client Success, Jennifer Maxwell, helps hc1 customers improve healthcare through actionable insights, attend one of the hc1 presentations at laboratory events this spring and summer.

If you’d like to collaborate with the hc1 Client Success team, check out hc1’s open positions for software engineers.

Finally, if you are an hc1 customer, have you checked out the new hc1 Academy yet? Let us know what you think. 

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Heather Stith is the hc1 senior technical writer. Before joining hc1, she edited dozens of nonfiction and how-to books, helping subject matter experts from a variety of fields share their knowledge with readers.