How Nebraska Medicine used AI to reduce employee turnover by nearly 50% in the first year
According to the National Library of Medicine, almost 18% of new nurses leave their jobs within the first year.
THE PROBLEM
Nebraska Medicine is an academic healthcare system committed to providing the best experience for the people who choose to work for it and to be a premier employer delivering high-quality care to the patients it serves in Omaha and beyond.
Like many health care systems across the country, it faces challenges in retaining its frontline teams, especially first-year nursing staff.
“Our frontline leaders and their teams were stressed and exhausted, and we saw increased employee burnout,” said Kelly Vaughn, vice president of operations at Nebraska Medicine. “We were looking for ways to relieve pressure on our frontline leaders while increasing engagement and retention of frontline employees – with the ultimate goal of stabilizing our frontline workforce and strengthening our employer brand.”
PROPOSAL
One of Nebraska Medicine’s key efforts has been finding ways to increase support for its frontline leaders and amplify their impact amid challenging bandwidth constraints. The healthcare system knew it needed to not only find new approaches to reduce the administrative burden on these leaders, but also help them collaborate more regularly and meaningfully with their teams.
“By better supporting our frontline leaders, we would put them in a better position to support their teams,” Vaughn explains. “We wanted to use technology to help streamline the work of our leaders, but we didn’t have anything in place that was already compliant or could be repurposed to achieve our goals.
“The Laudio platform provided the ability to unify key employee data into a single source, automate mundane tasks, prioritize leaders’ actions with their teams, and standardize best practices for leaders,” she continued. “Designed for the needs of frontline leaders, it sits on top of other systems, using automation and artificial intelligence to make leaders’ jobs easier and help them be more engaged with their teams.”
The health care system knew it couldn’t simply add more to the plate of its frontline leaders. It saw in this vendor platform a technology that could potentially make these best practices from leaders faster and more feasible.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
The platform is web-based, making implementation easy.
“Within weeks, we had frontline leaders running it and overseeing more than 5,000 frontline team members,” Vaughn noted. “The leaders quickly realized the benefits of this centralized platform for their key workflows and AI-based recommendations, allowing them to take advantage of impactful opportunities to connect with their team members.
“For the first time, frontline leaders had access to important data about their teams in one place, dramatically simplifying their workflows and improving visibility across their teams,” she added. “The system pulls data from core HRIS, time and attendance, scheduling and other systems, so instead of spending time searching for and piecing together information, leaders now have a one-stop shop. “
Nebraska Medicine now has a way to not only display information, but make it actionable for its leaders.
“The AI-based recommendations and built-in workflows make it quick and easy for our leaders to identify and take action on interaction opportunities with their team members – celebrating milestones, showing appreciation for going above and beyond, checking in regularly, etc.,” explained Vaughn. “Because the system shows these opportunities to our leaders, they don’t have to keep up to date manually or in a lot of different places.
“It makes the small but hugely impactful acts of leadership so much more achievable for our leaders,” she continued. “Additionally, the system also flags potential issues or trends that could indicate potential burnout or lack of engagement, allowing leaders to intervene early when necessary to get ahead of potential turnover.”
RESULTS
Nebraska Medicine saw strong results in two areas with this new AI-based platform: increased interactions between leaders and teams and a reduction in first-year employee turnover.
“Leaders on the front lines quickly embraced the Laudio platform,” Vaughn reported. “Since we went live with it, our leaders have had more than 27,000 personalized, timely interactions with their team members using the AI-based recommendations.
“Not only has this increased the frequency of interactions between leaders and frontline team members, but it has also enabled leaders to have more customized, meaningful engagement with their teams,” she added.
Most importantly, through the work it has done to empower its frontline leaders and increase their engagement with their teams, the healthcare system has achieved a nearly 50% reduction in the turnover of first-year nurses.
“This is based on comparing our first six months on the platform to the same period last year,” Vaughn explains. “It is a tremendous achievement for our healthcare system and reflects our commitment to both our leaders and our broader frontline teams, ultimately putting us in a better position to attract and retain the talent so critical to our ability to care for our patients serve.”
ADVICE FOR OTHERS
When considering this type of technology, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of the current workflows of frontline executives and where the sources of inefficiencies lie, Vaughn advised.
“There are many solutions available, and adding one more place for leaders to log in will not solve some of the core problems that arise from silos of data and systems,” she said. “Evaluate the scope of the technology and how it will truly streamline leaders’ work and extend existing solutions. Integrations are also crucial here.
“Also make sure the system enables action and not just shows data,” she continued. “It was a top priority for us to find actionable technology that would include AI and integrated workflows to measurably reduce the burden on our leaders, allowing them to access and then act on data more efficiently.”
The health care system also wanted to not only simplify the existing work that leaders were doing on the front lines, but also allow them to follow leadership best practices more easily and regularly, she added.
“Finally, pay close attention to whether the systems you are considering are designed with a strong understanding of frontline leaders and their unique needs in mind, or whether they are more general systems that are adapted for use by frontline leaders,” she concluded. “In our search, we looked for a purpose-built platform that had a demonstrated impact on key outcomes from other healthcare systems.”
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