Tips to Decrease Employee Absenteeism and Save on Healthcare Expenses
Hospital executives and administration are constantly under pressure to reduce costs without sacrificing patient care. For many, this means cutting labor costs. On average, about 50% of hospital revenue is spent on labor costs. One cost-saving opportunity is to provide staff with an easy to access resource for all of their health and wellness benefits. Providing hospital staff with mobile access to benefits options will save healthcare dollars, decrease employee absenteeism, and increase productivity.
Offering employees a comprehensive wellness mobile application (app), such as Continuwell, a product of TriageLogic, can help cut labor costs. It empowers employees to take care of their health, benefiting both you and the employee. A tool like this increases utilization of the services and resources that are already included in their benefits package. Here are tips on what to look for in an enterprise platform to consolidate your employee benefits and see the best return on investment.
1. Improve Access
Offering your staff a mobile application (app) with all of their health and wellness products and services in one place makes it easy for employees to see and use the services your hospital or practice provides. The app makes it easy to roll benefits to employees, and for them to take advantage of the benefits. With increased employee utilization, you are better able to see healthcare cost savings from preventing staff illness or unnecessary healthcare expenses.
2. Increase Engagement
It is important for any organization to increase employee engagement and employee involvement with their companies. Forbes reports that employee engagement is costing companies as much as $450 Billion in lost productivity, and hospitals are not immune from this statistic. To be effective, mobile applications need to engage employees by sending push notifications and placing events in a calendar.
The platform needs to allow your hospital to break down employees into separate groups and communicate with them based on health, department, demographics, or location. It is important to be able to segment your employees, so that your messages can be tailored and more effective. For example, messages to physicians will most likely be different than those for the housekeeping department. Administration can use the push notification feature to remind employees to use health services, such as telehealth and wellness challenges. This leads us to the next point.
3. Increase Usage and Access to Telehealth and Other Services
While many employers are starting to offer telehealth, a big challenge is to get employees to use it appropriately. Oftentimes, employees receive a card with a phone number to call for telehealth, but the card gets easily misplaced. In other cases, employees hesitate to call because of the required co-pay, “Are the symptoms serious enough to require a doctor or should I wait another day?” Free 24/7 nurses act as wellness ambassadors (see the Continuwell mobile app) and solve both of these problems by making the service accessible and free. Nurses educate employees about what benefits are available to them. Nurses can also connect the caller with a doctor, if one is needed. Regardless of what service you provide, employees want access to an objective person that they can call and ask questions about their health and wellness package.
4. Brand Your Hospital
Hospitals should look for a mobile app that can be uniquely branded. A quality platform should allow your hospital’s mobile app to be customizable. The different buttons need to be replaceable on demand as benefits and vendors are replaced. Having a customized employee app will help your hospital attract and retain quality talent.
To summarize, in order to help reduce labor costs implement an enterprise platform that will educate and consolidate employee benefits for your staff, improve communication, improve access to care, and set the hospital apart from competition. For more information about how to better organize and utilize your staff’s health and wellness benefits in order to save healthcare costs, please contact a TriageLogic representative today or visit www.Continuwell.com
What to Read Next: Reduce Hospital Readmissions
