The Right Choice

In healthcare delivery, making the right staffing decisions matters. That’s why choosing Catalyst could be the single most important decision your organization makes.

Catalyst is the leading provider of data-based solutions that enable healthcare organizations to make precise staffing-related decisions. Our state-of-the-art EVALISYS® tools, methodologies, and systems have proven their value time and again in healthcare organizations of all types and sizes.

EVALISYS Patient Classification System (PCS) is a family of valid, reliable workload measurement tools and processes that set the standard for clear-sighted staffing solutions. With its unique ability to capture care complexity, EVALISYS PCS allows flexible, acuity-based staffing for all care disciplines.

EVALISYS PCS Plus combines leading-edge analytic and observational methods to make workload and problematic staffing patterns visible. PCS Plus takes the guesswork out of staffing and skill-mix changes.

EVALISYS Patient Classification/Staff Activity Study® (Study) process offers comprehensive, enterprise-wide evaluation of staff utilization patterns and workload for all clinical disciplines, no matter what patient classification system you use. This objective process illuminates ways to ensure that the right care is provided to the right patient by the right staff.

With Catalyst, you have the knowledge-based foresight to make tough decisions with greater ease and confidence. You can see what your needs really are—and make changes that are responsible, informed, and more precise than ever before.

In short, Catalyst solutions help you improve patient care while enhancing the bottom line. Clients using Catalyst products, methodologies, and systems report an average 13:1 return on investment.

Any staffing schedule has one goal—to ensure that the best people are deployed where they will be most effective and where they are most needed. But no matter how carefully you plan, schedules are certain to change. Day to day. Even hour to hour.

With the iNOVAR® Resource Management System from Workgroup Connections, Inc., you will have a one-stop approach to handle those changes and manage resources more effectively throughout the enterprise. iNOVAR gives you the tools and information to make better, more informed decisions, ensure department coverage, control staffing costs, maximize productivity, support organizational goals, and improve employee satisfaction.

Rely on Experience
IBM web technologies provide the foundation for the iNOVAR Resource Management System. IBM's web-development environment is built on open standards which allow iNOVAR to run on most major operating systems and to interface with a wide variety of web services, database engines, and commercial applications.
Founded in 1993, Workgroup Connections Inc. is an award-winning IBM Lotus Authorized Education Center and Premier Business Partner specializing in software product development, consulting services, e-Learning and training. As an IBM Business Partner, we are provided unprecedented support through PartnerWorld, a worldwide program that supports commercial developers who build solutions using IBM technologies.

Our mission is to increase corporate productivity by helping businesses maximize resources and technology through leading-edge software development services and products. We help organizations make sense of their information and realize their business objectives by delivering effective communication and collaboration.

Over the years, we have successfully served the needs of hundreds of organizations, including Fortune 500 companies in manufacturing, IT, financial services, utilities industries and some of the largest healthcare organizations—two on the US News and World Report Hospital Honor Roll.

Healthcare, especially nursing, offers a unique set of challenges for accomplishing employee scheduling. With resources that float between different departments, work varying shift lengths (eight, 10 or 12-hour shifts) and need specific credentials to perform different tasks, scheduling is a very time-consuming, labor-intensive process to maintain manually. To make things a bit more challenging, healthcare schedulers also have to keep up with the facility’s varying acuity rates (number of patients and levels of care necessary for each patient) on a daily basis to ensure consistent regulatory compliance. Automating the scheduling process with API’s ActiveStaffer solution gives healthcare organizations more control over scheduling and staffing issues, so they can manage resources more effectively and control labor costs while helping to retain a qualified staff. ActiveStaffer helps to maximize resource utilization by having the right person with the right skill set in the right place at the right time. This reduces employee burnout rates, and gives them a more tolerable, satisfying work environment.

ActiveStaffer gives employees a sense of ownership and responsibility over something that is very valuable to them—their work schedules. Web access offers them additional flexibility to access self-service options such as viewing schedules, picking up available shifts, self-scheduling, shift bidding and submitting vacation/non-productive and unavailable time requests anywhere, anytime. This can be especially valuable to busy families—a nurse can pull up his/her schedule from home, and with the family present, can select shifts based on family needs.

Information is available in real-time, so managers can make better-informed and more proactive staffing decisions. Nurse managers are automatically alerted to staffing deficits or over-staffing based on patient census and acuity, employee absenteeism or schedule changes. By utilizing the most cost-effective employee to work, organizations can reduce the use of costly outside agency workers.

ActiveStaffer is a key tool not only for the organization’s financial health and increased employee morale, but also plays a role in improving patient care delivery because employees are not as overworked, and there are appropriate staff levels to address the current patient load.