Apollo Hospitals deploys Kronos Workforce Solution to augment superior care

Bengaluru: Apollo Hospitals Group, Asia’s leading integrated healthcare services provider, has selected an innovative workforce management solution from Kronos – a global leader in cloud-based human capital management, to boost workforce efficiencies and productivity.

The innovative solution from Kronos Incorporated, the global leader in workforce management cloud solutions, has gone live across Apollo’s six locations in South India, empowering its 3,000 workforce, with real-time visibility, and actionable insights, yielding quality care. Collaborative self-scheduling allows hospital staff to select their preferred schedules and make it easier to swap shifts and request time off, offering a more engaging experience that simplifies their work-life balance. These features will be extended to 15 more locations, covering about 8,000 employees during the next month.

Given the criticality of healthcare operations and the importance of accurate staffing to meet patient’s demand, the intuitive solution helps auto generate rosters and enables the nurses and other healthcare staff deliver better care. Ensuring right availability of key staff in critical functions to meet the patient needs, the new system also helps employees and managers take the right decisions, in the moment, for better outcomes. This also enables fairness and equity in policy administration and ensuring compliance management.

Studies indicate that patient experience and workforce engagement are intertwined. Hospitals that boost patient experience or employee engagement see improvement in patients’ ratings of their care. Besides, there is a compounding effect when hospitals improve in both superior patient experiences and engagement measures. Optimal engagement is also linked to enhanced employee satisfaction, quality care and financial returns.

Dr Hariprasad, Group president, Apollo Hospitals Group, said, “We are committed to investing in transformational innovations that empower our dedicated staff with greater, visibility to maximize their potential, meet unpredictable demands and deliver superior care. Our focus on talent, technology and transformation is aimed at offering better care for our staff, patients, society and the nation, while also making our processes more efficient. An integral part of this mission is ensuring right employee in the right place at the right time, fully engaged and empowered to manage their work better with timely interventions. We believe the Kronos data-driven platform will help us drive transparency and equity across our workforce and, further motivate our employees to provide patients with optimal care.”

The innovation enables hospital staff to access information on the device of their choice, providing engaging user experience across phones, mobile app, tablets, and desktops. Employees and managers will have access to self-service, submit requests, and manage approvals anytime and anywhere. The solution also provides options to mark attendance on a smartphone for employees on the move across locations.

The solution will also help the Apollo Hospitals Group to centralize and streamline payroll input process across 22 locations in India, with automation of complex rules across different states and employee groups – freeing up the payroll team to handle larger volumes of transactions with minimal manual interventions.

For the management at Apollo Hospitals, the solution will enable real-time visibility and actionable insights via Workforce Central to help them make more informed staffing decisions.

Sumeet Doshi, country manager, India, Kronos, said, “We are delighted to assist Apollo Hospitals – an institution that is touching lives every day – in managing its greatest asset – its people. Enabling them to access real-time information anytime, anywhere, in a personalized manner – be it smartphone, PC, or even a biometric kiosk. More so, it’s great that they realize that employees are key to superior patient care, and a healthy bottom-line. Workforce Management has undergone a great degree of change, with technology remaining at the heart of this disruption. We’re confident the Workforce Central suite will empower managers and employees to make more informed decisions, in the moment for better outcomes – and in turn will result in a better experience for their patients.”

It is vital for the healthcare industry to raise employee engagement and optimize the service-value chain. This is significant as aligning staffing to patient demand is complex and a daily challenge for health systems. Emergency room and inpatient surges often leave hospital units understaffed and managers scrambling to ensure appropriate coverage. The result of these inaccurate schedules is a high amount of last-minute schedule churn, which directly impacts financial performance, quality of patient care, and staff satisfaction.