Crouse Hospital employs automatic messages to seek substitutes

SYRACUSE  —  Sick calls are less of a time sink at Crouse Hospital, thanks to one man’s tinkering.

Christopher Hines, telecommunications supervisor at Crouse, set up a way for the hospital to use its mass-notification software to help supervisors find substitute workers. Instead of spending time working the phones to find replacements for sick employees, supervisors can now use a computer program to send out a blast message seeking someone who can work.

“I came up with my idea in our department after watching the supervisor spend 10 or 15 minutes routinely assigning staff,” Hines says. “I started playing with the software.”

Hines had the system ready to help with staffing in August 2011. It quickly spread to one of the hospital’s nursing departments, he says, adding that it has been running in a “small percentage” of Crouse for the better part of a year.

This month, the hospital is going to try to start moving the system toward widespread adoption within its walls. It would have done so earlier, if not for the summer vacation season.

“We’ll be slowly getting the word out,” Hines says. “We started to do some pushing over the summer, but so many people were off on vacation that it made it difficult to schedule training for a particular department, because people were off.”

Crouse purchased the software — San Diego–based MIR3, Inc.’s Intelligent Notification — initially to handle mass notifications sent to its employees in the event of a disaster, not to handle its substitute-finding needs. The hospital was fulfilling a state emergency-preparedness requirement, according to Hines. 

But he saw the opportunity to use it in a different way, to send out prepared notifications searching for substitutes when a worker calls in sick. The change saves supervisors from having to run down a lengthy list of potential replacements.

The move has been markedly useful for some nursing groups, Hines says.

“One particular department, they were spending close to a half hour, 45 minutes once or twice a day looking for staff,” he says. “Now the charge nurse just has to go in and type a short message, choose the group, and send it out.”

Workers have the ability to log on to the system and choose from different ways to receive calls for substitutes. Options include telephone messages, emails, and text messages. Employees can also specify times they’re available to receive those messages.

Administrators have the option of overriding those preferences if they have an emergency that requires the attention of all staff members, according to Hines.

Feedback on the new substitute system has been positive, he says. Staff members appreciate it because they know they’re all being contacted at the same time, giving them a fair chance to pursue opportunities for extra work. They aren’t worried about a manager showing favoritism. And managers have their own reasons for liking it.

“The managers like it because it only takes them a minute or less to send a message out,” Hines says. “Before it would have taken them a half hour or longer.”

Hines declined to disclose the price the hospital pays to use the software package. It is a yearly subscription fee, he says.

Applying the mass-notification system for substitutes wasn’t something suggested by a vendor, Hines adds. He couldn’t name a source of inspiration for the idea.

“It was just something that started off as a required software package,” he says. “It seemed that it wasn’t getting a lot of use during the year, except for notifications during emergency events. It was something that was required, but I wanted to do more with it.”

Crouse Hospital, located at 736 Irving Ave. in Syracuse, employs more than 2,700 people. The private, not-for-profit hospital is licensed for 506 acute-care beds and 57 bassinets. It serves over 23,000 inpatients, 66,000 emergency-services patients, and 250,000 outpatients a year in a 15-county area.

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com