Track: Healthcare Operations and Services

Abstract

Allied Health staffing has been a multi-decade challenge for many healthcare organizations and has become a crisis for nearly all healthcare organizations throughout the COVID-19 global pandemic. Mayo Clinic Health System in the Southwest Minnesota Region was not immune to these challenges. Recognition that staffing issues needed to be clearly defined, articulated, and planned served as a catalyst for developing and implementing a novel systematic approach coupled with process optimization using the staffing to workload tool. This revelation led to the present study, which explored establishing a centralized prospective staffing model for ambulatory clinics in the health system region. The study leveraged agile methods, widely utilized as a project management technique in the software development life cycle which is a principle where continuous feedback is incorporated on the product or service line being developed, along with the progress made, which was also an essential element of this study. Apart from establishing a staffing model, achievements made within this study included benchmarking well-established staffing related key metrics to national benchmarks, setting up a structure to manage staffing guidelines and standards centrally, an overview of key performance indicators and metrics as a region apart from siloed managing of resources by clinical sections and departments, and setting up processes to manage staffing and metrics of success on an ongoing basis. The work resulted in effective staffing to workload tool, allowing frontline leadership to identify and articulate staffing needs based upon outpatient visits and predictive capabilities in a practice or provider template change.  Findings were well received by
the key stakeholders, leadership constituencies, frontline leadership, and staff. 

Keywords
Outpatient staffing model, agile, Plan-Do-Study-Act, staffing to workload, ambulatory