Nursing Shortage and Reducing Wasted Nurses Time
March 10th, 2009 | 
Author: Reuters recently had an article on the nursing shortage. They mentioned over 216,000 nursing jobs currently unfilled. This is in the middle of the current economic recession that they are not filling those jobs.
For years we have been hearing about a nursing shorting for agencies serving people with developmental disabilities.
As I have been talking with people about cost savings – one item I constantly hear is that nurses are saving 1 to 2 hours per day when using Therap. Sometimes this leads to direct savings when agencies choose to reduce a nursing position. In other instances it frees up nurses to focus on quality issues or increase direct interaction.
Nurses at agencies which use Therap Health Tracking in particular are saving the most time. Quarterly nursing reports which used to take several hours can now be automatically generated in under 1 minute.
Also nurses are reporting that they are spending significantly less time driving to see pieces of paper.
Once again – just the nursing savings can more than pay for Therap. If an agency has one nurse for 45 individuals. The nurse earns $65,000 a year including fringe. Thats an allocated cost of $1444 per year per individual for nursing costs. If nurses are saving 20% of their time. Thats $288.88 per year per individual.
What are people seeing in your operations. Are nurses happier? More productive? How has their routine changed? Is it easier to recruit or keep nurses? Have their been cost savings – either in wages or mileage reimbursement?
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