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Labor management program saves health system $5 million

Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System is one of South Carolina’s largest community-based healthcare providers with 588 beds. It serves Spartanburg, Cherokee, and Union counties in South Carolina as well as Polk and Rutherford counties in North Carolina. Flagship Spartanburg Regional Medical Center is a research and teaching hospital. With more than 100,000 visit annually, its emergency center is one of the nation’s busiest Level I trauma centers.

Situation:

Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System (SRHS) expenses were outpacing revenue and it was on the verge of adding expenses with the opening of a 48-bed hospital. SRHS needed to reduce costs, and the largest opportunity for that was labor. They wanted to achieve the cost savings through more strategic and efficient use of employees.

Solution:

SRHS partnered with Premier Consulting Services™ (PCS) to develop and implement a plan geared toward cost reduction and productivity improvement that combined tools, services and knowledge sharing. SRHS also selected Premier’s OperationAdvisor™ tool — which integrates productivity measurement, benchmarking and comparative data analysis — along with a full-time Premier Performance Partner. The project identified possible staff reductions of nearly 80 FTEs. PCS subject matter experts worked with department heads to implement identified FTE reductions and also trained them on how to monitor productivity using OperationAdvisor.

Result:

Reduced FTEs by 62 and SRHS
Saved nearly $5 million
Decreased overtime by 2 percent
Watch lists highlighted cost centers with productivity below or above a established goals. Lists initially regularly included 100 cost centers, which was reduced to less than a dozen.
Department heads began shifting to a resource utilization view from a purely financial view

"Some just didn’t believe Premier consultants would find anything they could improve on. They were humbled. They were like ‘Wow! This is very good. Very informative. Very educational."

                                  Janet Thompson
        Director of Financial Performance
   Spartanburg Regional Health System

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