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Alegent Health goes live with Credential Feed from Smart Square

Smart Square, the nurse scheduling software from Avantas, keeps managers and staff aware of upcoming licensure expirations

Omaha, NE, January 5, 2010 Alegent Health, a hospital system known for superior quality and patient satisfaction, is using Smart Square to track and notify staff of licensure and credential information for its five metro Omaha hospitals.

Already being utilized to manage the 24/7 employee scheduling and staffing operations for nursing and non-nursing units across the organization, Smart Square is now being employed to automate what was once a time-consuming and paper-heavy task.

The previous process required Alegent Health's HR representatives to run a report of approaching expirations. This was distributed to managers who were responsible for staff member communication including subsequent follow-up tasks via printouts in mailboxes, phone calls, e-mails, etc.

Now, a daily interface between Smart Square and Alegent Health's HR system automates the process, providing simultaneous messages to staff and managers relative to upcoming expirations of 244 unique credentials.

"This innovation will improve the quality of each hospital's credentialing process while saving tremendous time for management staff in clinical areas," said Alegent Health’s Vice President of Human Resources, Nancy Wallace.

These notifications, like other Smart Square communications, i.e. shift trade requests, manager announcements, time-off requests, etc. are delivered via the Smart Square Communications Portal in addition to e-mail and text message, if a staff member so chooses.

"Smart Square was created specifically for healthcare staffing," said Chris Fox, Avantas' Senior Vice President of Growth & Innovation. "The Software as a Service (SaaS) framework, the Business Intelligence and Analytics components, the intuitive nurse scheduling and staffing functionality, the communications capabilities; everything was designed to help make healthcare processes more efficient. Smart Square automates a lot of the administrative tasks that keep healthcare workers from doing what they want to do – care for patients."

Smart Square selected as Healthcare Scheduling Solution by Immanuel Senior Living

Partnership with Avantas to include Smart Square, Avantas Pools, and Staffing Resource Center

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Omaha, NE, November 12, 2009 -/PR Newswire/- Already utilizing Avantas Pools to provide health professionals for their Assisted Living Communities in Omaha and Lincoln, Immanuel Senior Living and Avantas have expanded their relationship to include Avantas’ web-based scheduling software, Smart Square and the Staffing Resource Center.

With Smart Square, healthcare organizations can maximize core staff, reduce overtime and external agency, manage incentives, and quickly review and adjust daily labor utilization. With real-time analytics and interactive dashboards, Smart Square provides the means to make decisions based on accurate and timely data. Additionally, the Software as a Service (SaaS) framework upon which Smart Square is built results in fast implementations involving very little client IT support.

The Staffing Resource Center comprises Avantas’ in-house resource management experts. Its 24/7 operation employs Smart Square to put proven, best-practice resource management methodologies into practice.

"Avantas Work Strategies are being utilized by our client-partners as a meaningful solution for their entire enterprise," said Chris Fox, Avantas' Senior Vice President of Growth & Innovation. "The Smart Square value proposition leverages the software’s unique ability to manage against quality and financial targets for all sectors of the employee population, including inpatient and outpatient nursing, allied health and ancillary departments. We are thrilled to expand our client base to include Assisted Living Communities through our partnership with Immanuel Senior Living. They are a committed and quality organization and we look forward to contributing to their future success."

"We are very excited to 'go live' with Smart Square," said Deb Welk, Director of Health Care Services for Immanuel Senior Living. "The Scheduling features alone make it the most impressive product I've seen, not to mention the Business Intelligence and Analytics components. We see Smart Square as part of our mission to develop unique solutions to meet the housing and healthcare needs of the people we serve."

Immanuel Senior Living partners with Avantas for Health Staffing Solution

Avantas expands its Healthcare Pool to serve Senior Health and Assisted Living Communities in Omaha and Lincoln.

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Omaha, NE, November 4, 2009 -(PR.com)- Avantas is proud to announce a new partnership with Immanuel Senior Living to provide health professionals to their Assisted Living Communities in Omaha and Lincoln.

For over a decade, Avantas has established relationships with healthcare organizations to provide flexible and capable professionals to inpatient nursing and ancillary units.

This partnership with Immanuel Senior Living provides Avantas the opportunity to introduce its unique methodology of resource placement to Assisted Living Communities.

Designed to meet patient needs as they unfold, the Avantas Pool comprises a thin layer of professionals deployed at the last possible moment before the start of a shift to fill the critical gaps in staffing. This strategy is cost-effective and improves quality of care by placing the "best of the best" where they are needed, when they are needed.

"We are very excited to have partnered with Immanuel Senior Living to help provide care for their residents," said Joan Kunes, Director of Avantas Pools. "They have wonderful communities and a terrific staff that believe in the work they do."

"Avantas has a glowing reputation for providing excellent care," said Deb Welk, Director of Health Care Services for Immanuel Senior Living. "This is the level of quality that our residents and their families expect and deserve. We are looking forward to expanding our partnership with Avantas as we continue to improve our staffing strategies for our residents and staff."

Johnson City Medical Center saves $550,000 with Smart Square^®

Overtime & Agency usage down significantly in the first year using nurse scheduling software from Avantas.

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JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. -- Aug. 18/PR Newswire/-- Johnson City Medical Center (JCMC), the 488 bed, Magnet- designated flagship hospital of Mountain States Health Alliance (MSHA), has seen dramatic savings in a slumping economy as a result of Smart Square, the enterprise scheduling software from Avantas.

One year after going live with Smart Square, JCMC has realized a savings of nearly $550,000 associated with overtime and external agency usage.

With Smart Square, organizations can maximize core staff, reduce overtime and external agency, manage incentives, and quickly review and adjust daily labor utilization. With real-time analytics and interactive dashboards, Smart Square provides the means to make decisions based on accurate and timely data.

The Smart Square Predictive Model is 95% accurate in forecasting future patient levels, allowing schedule balancing weeks in advance, reducing reliance on overtime and external staffing sources.
Forecasted year two ROI related to overtime and external agency usage is projected at nearly $1.3 million.

"In the current environment of very constrained resources with respect to manpower and payment, Smart Square is an essential tool for nursing managers, providing them with up-to-date costs and opportunities for savings," said Kathryn Wilhoit, Corporate Vice President of MSHA, responsible for the Central Staffing and Resource Management Process Tracking System's strategic plan. "We are planning to expand its use to the other clinical departments such as respiratory therapy, radiology, pharmacy and laboratory."

"MSHA is a great example of a forward thinking organization," said Chris Fox, Avantas’ Vice President of Growth & Innovation. "They were ready to shed the 'business as usual' mindset and use the business intelligence tools Smart Square makes available to manage their resources against their quality and financial targets on a daily basis."

Senator Ben Nelson Advocates for Avantas

2009-08-04

There is outstanding news today as Avantas and the looming crisis of workforce shortages in the health industry have received the attention of the highly esteemed and influential Senator from Nebraska, Ben Nelson.

After several meetings with Senator Nelson’s office, they became convinced that automation around the key issue of staffing should share the spotlight with EMR (electronic medical records) which has held the stage in discussions about healthcare reform. Health organizations have been enticed to advance their adoption of EMRs through promises of stimulus money under the ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). Senator Nelson became convinced that Avantas and its array of work strategies for the health industry, especially our highly-evolved Predictive Model, deserved to be called out as a potential use for stimulus funding. Once Senator Nelson agreed to promote our cause, the decision related to the proper channel for this advocacy required much discussion and planning. In the end, all agreed the most appropriate entrance to this discussion was through the Health and Human Services Office, specifically the recently named National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Dr. David Blumenthal.

Click here to read Senator Ben Nelson’s letter to Dr. Blumenthal sent on August 4, 2009.

SAS® helps power Avantas’ innovative staffing solution

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SAS Forecasting Server By taking years of data and industry expertise and pairing it with SAS Forecast Server, Avantas helps client hospitals spend more time on patient care and less time staffing their units. With SAS, Avantas has grown its staffing forecast business without increasing its work force.

The Omaha, NE, company is recognized for proven, best-practice work strategies for the health industry and provides staffing forecasts to 22 hospitals (200 units) nationwide as part of its Smart Square® staffing solution. Avantas’ offering helps hospitals spend less time on administrative staffing tasks and more time on improving the quality of patient care at the nursing-unit level. More effective staffing helps hospitals save money and improve morale by reducing dependence on contract nurses and last-minute schedule changes. With excellent forecasts, hospitals are better able to assign bonus dollars to the work shifts that are the hardest to fill, and use shift premiums and overtime more effectively.

Prior to using SAS, it took an Avantas staff member three to four weeks to generate forecasts. “We’d have to pull data out of SPSS, paste it into Excel and do it over and over again. It was very manual and very time consuming, and we could only update that forecast when something changed,’’ explains Julie Kiefer, Manager of Analytics. “We wanted to automate our forecasts in order to provide our clients with a proactive solution.” The company also wanted to expand and could not do so without either hiring additional staff or finding a more efficient forecasting method.

Avantas chose SAS because it can handle thousands of models and automate the process. “With other solutions, the amount of manual work would have been overwhelming.. SAS has the ability to incorporate hundreds of different models, allowing us to create a custom forecasting methodology. That is very important because every unit in a hospital behaves so differently,’’ Kiefer says. Among the client successes using SAS Forecast Server:

Hospital users have the information at their fingertips via a real-time, decision-support dashboarding tool.
Nurse managers, who once spent 60 percent of their time on staffing issues, spend less than half that with the Avantas solution.
Shift bonus dollars are targeted more accurately. Hospital clients now know the highest-need shifts far in advance and can offer the right amount of supplement pay to get them filled promptly.
Nursing managers can decrease expenses by staffing more efficiently, which saves on overtime, contract-nursing costs and nursing turnover. Units are also staffed appropriately, leading to a higher quality of care.

For Avantas, SAS has brought other kinds of success:

The company has grown its business fivefold without adding staff to the forecasting area. Avantas staffers can create a unit forecast in about eight hours versus 80 hours pre-SAS.
The accuracy of unit-staffing models has increased 13 percent, on average (30 days out). The accuracy continues to improve dramatically as it gets closer to the shift date.
The forecasting ability Avantas provides customers by using SAS is a huge selling point to hospitals. “It’s one of our sizzle points. We have 10 years of business intelligence experience and data that feed these models,’’ says Michelle Krapfl, Vice President of Operations and Administrative Services. “The ability to make adjustments to the models and immediately receive updated forecasts is crucial for the 24/7 ever-changing healthcare environment.’’

SAS not only offered Avantas a product that could leverage their data, it provided domain experts through SAS Professional Services to get the most out of the solution. “Our models aren’t run on just general data. It’s very specific to the healthcare industry and SAS experts supported us every step of the way,’’ Krapfl says.

Most importantly, the forecasts go a long way to making the harried life of a nurse manager a little easier. “It really gives them the peace of mind that they can see critical needs weeks in advance to proactively recruit the right staff, avoiding the last-minute chaos in staffing,’’ Krapfl says. “Nurses want to focus on patient care, not scheduling.”

Avantas Uses SAS® Analytics to Revolutionize Its Healthcare Forecasting Saving Organizations Time and Money

read the full story at www.sas.com

SAS Forecasting Server Using predictive analytics from SAS, the leader in business analytics, Avantas helps hospitals accurately forecast staffing needs so that they can spend more time on patients and less time staffing their units.

Avantas provides staffing forecasts to 22 hospitals nationwide as part of its Smart Square ® staffing solution. Its service helps hospitals reduce

dependence on contract nurses and limit last-minute schedule changes. Not only can clients save money and improve morale, they can target bonus dollars to the hardest shifts to fill.

Prior to SAS - Forecast Server, it took three to four weeks to generate forecasts. "We’d pull data from SPSS, paste it into Excel – over and over again. It was manual and time-consuming. We could only update a forecast when something changed," explains Julie Kiefer, Manager of Analytics at Avantas. "We wanted to automate our forecasts to provide our clients with a proactive solution." The company also wanted to expand, but couldn’t without either hiring additional staff or making forecasting more efficient.

Avantas liked the ability of SAS to handle hundreds of models and automate the process. "Other solutions required more hands-on work. SAS can incorporate hundreds of different models, allowing us to create a custom forecasting methodology, which is very important because every hospital department behaves differently," Kiefer says. Among Avantas' successes using SAS Forecast Server.

Hospitals have information at their fingertips via a real-time decision support dashboard.
Nurse managers who spent 60 percent of their time on staffing now spend less than half that.
Shift bonus dollars are accurately targeted. Hospital clients know high-need shifts far in advance and can offer the right supplement pay to fill them promptly.
Nurse managers can decrease expenses by staffing more efficiently saving on overtime, contract nursing costs and nursing turnover.
Units are staffed appropriately leading to a higher quality of care.
Avantas has grown business five-fold without adding staff in the forecasting area.
Avantas staffers can create a unit forecast in about eight hours vs. 80 hours before using SAS.
Unit staffing model accuracy has increased 13 percent at 30 days out. Accuracy improves dramatically closer to shift dates.

SAS not only enabled Avantas to harness its information, it provided domain experts to get the most out of the solution. "Our models are very specific to the healthcare industry and SAS experts supported us every step of the way," said Michelle Krapfl, Vice President of Operations, Avantas.

Most importantly, the forecasts make the harried life of a nurse manager a little easier. "It gives them peace of mind to see critical needs weeks in advance and recruit the right staff, avoiding last minute staffing chaos," Krapfl says. "Nurses want to focus on patient care, not scheduling."

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW ® . SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2009 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

Former Avantas President Elected To International Healthcare Society

Di Smalley, RN, BSN, MPH, FACHE, president and CEO of Mercy Health System of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City, was elected to serve on the Board of Governors of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). Smalley took office at the Council of Regents meeting during ACHE’s 52nd Congress on Healthcare Leadership. She will serve a three-year term representing ACHE affiliates on the organization’s Board of Governors.

Before Mercy, Smalley served Avantas LLC in Omaha, Neb., as president from 2005-07. At Alegent Health in Omaha, her roles included senior executive from 2003-05, vice president for operations from 1999-03, and chief operating officer from 1997-99. She also served Avantas as cofounder and managing representative from 1999-04. Before being elected an ACHE Governor, Smalley was the regent for Nebraska from 2002-06.

In addition to her service to ACHE, Smalley has been a member of the board of directors of Memorial Community Hospital, the Nebraska Stroke Foundation, and the Nebraska Board of Ambulance Advisers. She also is on the board of directors for the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce and the United Way of Greater Oklahoma City.

Mercy Health System of Oklahoma http://www.mercyok.net
American College of Healthcare Executives http://www.ache.org

Building From Scratch

March 1, 2008

Officials at Avantas say that when they agreed to serve as a real-world client for the teams of students in the spring semester Applied Business Simulation class, they were hoping for, at the most, a baseline model they could utilize as they determine the feasibility of taking one of their products to a new city. They got more.

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Avantas Announces Smart Square
The Next Generation of Scheduling Software

2008-02-08 12:18:13

Omaha, Neb. – Avantas, a service organization providing best-practices work strategies to health care organizations, recently announced the release of Smart Square – a patentpending suite of automated nurse scheduling software tools invented by a team of health professionals including full-time professional staffers, advanced degree mathematicians, human resource strategists, nursing leaders and some of the best, most experienced software developers in the nation.