How to Monitor Hospital Staff
The field of healthcare is an essential yet critical one. The critical nature of the field is why hospitals need to make sure they employ the right staff. Unfortunately, this can be quite difficult to do, unless hospitals implement workplace monitoring.
Hospitals can monitor their employees with the help of employee monitoring software like Wolfeye. This allows them to receive comprehensive reports on their chosen metrics, such as FTE and incidental worked time.
Read below as we discuss in more detail how you can use employee monitoring software to monitor hospital staff.
How to Monitor Hospital Staff
It’s truly unfortunate that many healthcare workers in the United States and around the world experience unique challenges and struggles at their workplace due to the critical nature of their jobs. Moreover, these struggles may cause them to lose focus, heavily impacting their roles.
Fortunately, hospitals can identify such instances by using employee monitoring software as an essential tool to monitor their staff. Software like Wolfeye is designed to provide comprehensive reports on chosen metrics.
This allows the employees’ superiors to monitor their well-being and provide support where necessary.
Employee monitoring software contains essential features such as:
CCTV Support
An effective employee monitoring software like Wolfeye provides a centralized monitoring platform which also includes CCTV support. Employers can remotely view live CCTV footage from their devices to monitor their staff on office premises.
Attendance and Reporting
Most employee monitoring software comes with attendance and reporting features. These reports contain comprehensive information about the employees’ performance at work.
This allows employers to effectively implement a rewards and benefits system that incentivizes employees who manage to go above and beyond.
Web Activity
Monitoring web activity during work hours can provide employers with essential information about their employees’ activities. It can also help them ensure that employees do not misuse work-issued devices by visiting unauthorized websites.
What Can You Monitor with Employee Monitoring Software?
Now that you’re familiar with employee monitoring software, let’s have a look at the various metrics you can choose to monitor with the help of this software.
Healthcare Outcomes
The primary role of a healthcare provider is to ensure that patients receive effective and high-quality medical care. This makes it all the more important to track clinical outcomes.
Some examples of metrics hospitals can use to evaluate healthcare outcomes include mortality rates, incidences of infection, complication rates, readmission rates, and incidents involving patient safety.
These metrics can be tracked and compared to targets and standards using information from clinical registries, and e-health records.
Furthermore, tracking these metrics can serve as an essential complement to primary patient care, allowing healthcare providers to identify any gaps in care, such as medical adherence.
Streamlined Operations
It’s no secret that the majority of the healthcare sector is running low on resources. Hospitals often rely on healthcare workers to efficiently use the resources available to them to provide the highest quality of care.
This use of resources can be monitored by establishing and quantifying operational efficiency metrics, such as the duration of hospitalizations, productivity, cost, and waste.
The resulting data can help hospitals discover and implement efficient methods like automated processes and standardized procedures.
FTE Leakage
Full-time equivalent (FTE) leakage refers to cases where hospital staff does not work the hours they are obligated to, per their job requirements.
Hospital staff members often find themselves filling in for absent coworkers or agency workers when supervisors grant paid time off without a substitute or when scheduling staff does not adhere to their FTE commitments.
This type of staffing can often build costs for the hospital, given that the substitute employees could have been used to deliver important care to other patients. Hospitals can track FTE leakage by employing monitoring software that effectively tracks metrics like attendance and working hours.
Incidental Worked Time
Any moment a hospital employee clocks in before their shift begins or checks out after their shift ends, they accumulate incidental worked time.
Research indicates that the majority of incidental work time is not essential and can cost hospitals up to $400,000 a year.
As a whole, this affects the capacity of individual hospitals and eventually entire systems to recruit supplementary resources that provide quality patient care.
Hospitals can track and monitor IWTs by tracking the amount of working hours as well as the employees’ activities. This can provide them with important opportunities for intervention. After all, the vast majority of IWTs can be avoided using staff training and automated processes.
Legalities of Monitoring Hospital Staff
While most employers have the inherent legal right to monitor their employees while they are on the clock, there are some important limitations they must consider before they implement these efforts. It is also important to consider the differences between federal and state laws.
Let’s have a look at the overall legalities involved in monitoring hospital staff.
Federal Law
Under Federal law, most employers are permitted to monitor their staff, although there is some ambiguity involved in “eavesdropping.” There are also restrictions based on where the employees can be monitored. For example, it is perfectly legal to monitor employees in office areas; however, monitoring them in the cafeteria or locker rooms may be unlawful and usually leads to lawsuits.
State Laws
When it comes to state law, there may be differing laws concerning workplace monitoring initiatives.
These laws generally concern questions of consent, regardless of the method of monitoring (e.g., audio, video, or email). Legal professionals often advise that companies inform their employees about surveillance and obtain formal consent before implementing such monitoring efforts.
To avoid any legal troubles down the road, we generally recommend monitoring employees only while they are on the clock and within office premises. It is also advisable to seek the advice of a legal attorney to ensure you comply with any specific state laws concerning employee monitoring.
Conclusion
Monitoring hospital staff is becoming increasingly necessary for employers, in light of the general issues faced by the healthcare industry. Fortunately, technological advancements now allow employers to implement effective monitoring solutions like Wolfeye in the workplace.