Avista Counts the Money and Time Saved

Avista Counts the Money and Time Saved

By Patrick Connole

The following is an advertorial for Veras (www.veras.com), the first HRIS designed from the ground up for post-acute care operators. The AI-enabled platform manages scheduling, timekeeping, communication, and reporting in order to bring efficiencies to labor costs and shift filling, resulting in more time to focus on care.

Lauren Carlisle, director of recruitment and employee services at Avista Senior Living, brings a wealth of knowledge to her work and keeps focused on ROI at all times. So, when it comes to what Veras and its platform has managed to help Avista do in the way of bringing cost savings to the HRIS needs of her company, the numbers stand out.

For example, she said some 890 hours have been saved on scheduling so far this year, with 377 hours saved on finding call-off coverage. There have also been around 1,510 shift pick-ups in the Veras app (90 percent shift fill rate, with 15,179 of 17,045 open shifts covered over 12 months).

All told, she said, these efficiencies in filling shifts, checking in and out of work precisely as scheduled, and speed at which the Veras app works has resulted in $127,350 projected annual savings on overtime, $14,473 projected annual savings on missed breaks, and $38,973 projected annual savings on extra time (early / late clock-in).

Meeting Veras

On the job for Avista for nine years and based at the company’s corporate home in Arizona, Carlisle said the relationship with Veras began with a demo, which led to a pilot program in some of the Avista communities.

From that beginning, the two things that stood out for her were Veras technology and the focus on building a relationship from the start.

“The technology they have with an AI component makes things easier for reaching out to our employees to take shifts. One of the biggest issues I think we have with our health service directors is they cannot do the health service role as much because they're stuck in the waves of scheduling and dealing with the call-offs and the management of the staff,” she said.

“It was so bad that some nurses were spending 10-20 hours a week, half of their job in the worst case on scheduling.”

Other systems Avista uses have scheduling modules, but they proved incapable of bringing real cost and time savings to the real-world setting that a care center operates.

Veras also brought integration to the forefront, ending the need for multiple systems being used across the communities, which in itself made the job of managing HRIS much easier.

“Everyone had these different platforms that they were using. But the corporate office team needs to know what's happening with their scheduling because there has to be a consistent system,” Carlisle said.

“I felt like the teams were having to do way more work to get their scheduling platforms where they needed it to be because every time a new hire came on, it wouldn't just integrate to the system. So, the integration technology side of things with Veras and our HRIS, the AI component, and the cost savings all pay off.”

Guiding the Way

Veras also showed the Avista team the little ways to make every minute count, like missed meal breaks and staff clocking in too soon or too late.

“It’s just super great customer service. From the very beginning, they were not pressuring us necessarily, but willing to work with us and build something that we need, and willing to work with our demands, and they continue to take our input and make changes rapidly for the better,” Carlisle said.

“They've actually made quite a few of our changes and they get the kudos back to the team, which I love that they come back and say this was a great suggestion for you. Thank you.”

The AI Appeal

She noted the way the Veras system uses AI is appealing, taking a lot of the grunt work out of calculations with the proper security in place.

“We have to be confidential and HIPPA-compliant with what we have. So, the fact that Verus is HIPPA-compliant was a selling feature for us as well since we're working with sensitive data. The AI component we trust because of the safeguards they have in place,” Carlisle said.

“We don't want to necessarily turn everything over to AI. But an example of how their technology helps is that we don’t want to have our nurses texting and creating group texts for everyone to say, ‘Can you pick up this shift?’ Instead, the AI component will say, here is everyone that could be open for a shift pickup and we'll just send a message out to them for us. It's the little time savings that the AI component's doing,” she said.

Finally, Avista frontline staff love the Veras system for its ease of use. “They need consistency. They need things that are not cumbersome or clunky to them. I have found that the Veras system is easy and most of them would say the same thing too, that it's simple. The log-in process is not complicated, which we appreciate, and the way that they can get the text messages and notifications on their phone is easy,” Carlisle said.

Contact Patrick Connole at pconnole@parkplacelive.com with comments or questions.