Case Study: Nurses Online

Nurses On Line reinvents the temporary healthcare staffing industry in South Africa

Nurses On Line (NOL) is a mobile first platform that automates the process of booking nursing staff and matches nurses to unit managers at hospital wards. It was previously a medical staffing agency that would receive requests from hospital wards for temp nurses. They would then manually contact each nurse and confirm the booking to the ward manager. With the platform, it aims to make its matching process more efficient and real-time, and enable hospitals to analyze the data they collect.

Challenges

• Platform needed to allow nurses to be notified of requests and respond to them immediately
• Unit managers needed to arrange nurses in advance through the platform when they foresaw a shortage
• Unit managers needed to alert Nurses On Line if there were disciplinary, attendance or attitude issues with the temp staff
• Hospitals needed a panel to track work hours for nurses, expenditure and bookings happening through NOL

Solutions

• Data adds Transparency: On NOL, the nurses check in and check out before and after every shift, so the data shows exactly how many hours the nurse has worked. In the case of a conflict, this transparency reduces word against word and you can always check what happened through the system.
• Workforce Projection: Unit Managers can go through historical data to make projections of the number of permanent vs temporary staff they need.
• Quality Control: Only nurses who have received an orientation from NOL for a particular ward will be shown in the matching process.

Outcome

• Nurses have been able to manage their schedule all in one place – confirmations, bookings, cancellations, wards – resulting in minimal discrepancies and faster response times
• Advance bookings (upto a month before) have ensured that nurses have a secure income source and guaranteed stream of work.
• Unit Managers have been able to better utilize the time spent in scheduling and following up with nurses in other core activities
• Hospitals have been able to monitor how different cost centres have been operating