Banner Health, one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare systems in the country, is putting technology to work on managing employee productivity.
Banner is rolling out OperationsAdvisor (OA), a Web-based labor benchmarking solution. All of Banner's 22 hospitals will use OA, which is part of Premier's LaborConnect program. The Phoenix-based healthcare system serves Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada and Wyoming.
The deployment of the labor offering is aimed at better managing labor costs while improving quality and safety, Banner officials said.
"We were looking for a solution to help us better manage our hospital labor performance as well as our corporate overhead areas," said Dennis Dahlen, Banner Health's chief financial officer. "Premier's OperationsAdvisor, used in concert with their other tools to monitor infection control and quality, provides us the ability to compare against our peers and national benchmarks to ensure that we're targeting best practices in terms of both efficiency and quality."
Dahlen said Premier provides a rich database for benchmarking the growing list of centralized overhead functions such as IT, revenue cycle and human resources.
Banner has been an owner of the Premier Purchasing Partners group purchasing network since 2000 and recently confirmed ownership in Premier. Banner Health also uses Premier performance and cost improvement solutions such as SafetySurveillor to help prevent healthcare-associated infections; QualityManager to enhance efficiency and quality care measures; and SupplyFocus to benchmark supply costs.
"To achieve operational success, organizations need to strategically identify key areas of performance improvement, prioritize resulting projects, create effective standards and validate budget decisions," said Keith J. Figlioli, Premier senior vice president of healthcare informatics. "Benchmarking data is key as it allows hospitals to create effective labor standards, validate budget decisions and prioritize process improvement projects."
