Alverno Laboratories Achieves Significant Labor Savings with Automated Workforce Management
Alverno Laboratories faced mounting operational strain as it expanded its network of hospital and physician-office labs, making efficient workforce management a strategic priority. By implementing StaffReady’s cloud-based workforce management platform, Alverno automated complex scheduling rules, streamlined staffing processes, and created a unified system for managing labor across its facilities which significantly reducing manual administrative work and shifting time back to productive, patient-focused activities.
This transformation not only delivered measurable labor savings and scheduling efficiency at scale but also supported Alverno’s broader goals of operational consistency and responsiveness in a growing clinical services environment.
The issue of deficiencies in yearly inspections was keeping me up at night. It’s one of the main reasons we continued our engagement with StaffReady. Not only had they streamlined scheduling; they improved our entire compliance and competency management process as well.
Clinical Reference Laboratory System
Results at a Glance
Scheduling
• Schedule-creation labor expense: 50+% reduction annually
• Schedule-creation labor expense: 50+% reduction annually
Competency
• 80% reduction in cited deficiencies
• Leaders no longer review each competency individually; this is done at a system level
Efficiency at Scale
As with most hospital and reference laboratories, staff scheduling, compliance management and overall workforce management (WFM) grows increasingly complex by the year. Alverno Laboratories felt this pain acutely as they expanded from small beginnings in 1999 to approximately 2000+ staff multi-state integrated laboratory system that it is today.
Alverno Challenges
As Alverno grew, the organization began to feel the pinch of managing 1000+ staff spread across their system which encompasses hospital laboratories, patient service centers, and in office phlebotomists across Indiana and Illinois, as well as a multidepartment central laboratory in Hammond, IN.
- Sites were sharing employees but had no ability to transparently manage their real-time locations or the status of their competencies. In addition, there were gaps in systemwide awareness of leave status and shift bids, standardization of naming conventions, predictive overtime reporting, and consistent audit trails.
- Further, morale around the critical area of scheduling was low across the board. Managers felt the schedule was never complete or satisfactory for their staff, while staff felt the schedule was not published far enough in advance to plan activities or vacations, and were also unable to access it from home.
- Managers were facing competency deficiencies during inspections, further increasing pressure to pivot to a different approach to managing all aspects of compliance and competency assessment processes.
In making these decisions to automate, how staff perceived and experienced these changes mattered significantly to leadership.
In 2010, Alverno’s President & CEO, Sam Terese, saw an opportunity to utilize cloudbased software automation to address the key issues that complexity, staff shortages and increased regulations brought to his organization.
In selecting StaffReady as Alverno’s software partner, he was able to alleviate the most challenging issues, increase efficiencies and optimize staffing without sacrificing employee morale. StaffReady proved to be the clinical WFM solution Alverno was looking for to address leadership’s desire to maintain high-quality laboratory testing in an environment that prioritized employee work/life balance.
“We wanted to empower our employees and give them online access and control overmanaging their work/life balance, this was a significant consideration as we approached this decision.”
