According to the American Hospital Association’s 2020 Trendwatch: Hospital and Health System Workforce Strategic Planning report, healthcare organizations are the #1 employers in most communities. Overall, in the US, hospitals support 17.3 million jobs, or one out of nine jobs and over 56% of hospital costs are workforce wages and salaries. Today, the demands on workforce planning in healthcare organizations are greater than ever before.
Healthcare organizations need to plan for a future characterized by growing demand from patients for high-quality healthcare and rising costs. This comes at a time when the health care system is facing numerous challenges, including an ageing population, changes to healthcare reform, regulatory constraints, and technology changing traditional functions and roles. Workforce planning helps healthcare organizations develop strategies to get ahead of the evolving business needs and demands of the healthcare system. When your organization’s workforce plan is aligned with a strategic plan that addresses these challenges, you will be in a better position to identify goals, resource requirements and policies that may need to be implemented to improve how the organization operates and performs.
Unfortunately, where healthcare organizations can go wrong is by using cumbersome spreadsheets for budgeting. Wages and salaries comprise of over 56% of typical health organization budgets, so managing compensation and having the ability to budget by position is vital in understanding the impact of staffing models. The static nature of spreadsheets doesn’t provide the ability to collaborate on workforce plans or analyze the performance of budgets. Many organizations spend immeasurable amounts of time organizing disconnected spreadsheets, and entering or correcting data, instead of gaining important insights that will lead to better workforce planning.
Questica Budget is a cloud-based budgeting solution that empowers healthcare organizations with the powerful functionality needed to create multiple budgets, forecasts, reports and what-if scenarios, as well as analyze data to understand the impact of workforce planning. Questica Budget provides a secure and collaborative system that enables users to drill-down through the budget details, track funding and grants, account for variables and allocate resources more effectively. With a comprehensive view of budgets hosted in Questica Budget, healthcare organizations have the functionality necessary to manage hundreds of positions, compensation and other staff-related expenses.
When a healthcare organization needs to develop strategies to optimize staffing and offer the high-quality care patients demand, Questica Budget aligns workforce plans to key strategies. As a flexible system for adjusting budgets as business needs and demands change, as well as providing the tools for creating forecasts and analyzing data to gain important insights, an organization trades the pain of cumbersome spreadsheets for the ability to make data-informed decisions. The healthcare system may be facing challenges, but a powerful budgeting solution like Questica Budget ensures making workforce planning a priority can be successfully accomplished.
To learn more about the Questica Budget Suite of cloud solutions for healthcare budgeting and workforce planning, read one of our blogs or white papers, take a product tour or sign-up for one of our free monthly informational webinars.
