ES Optimizer Takes Woman’s Hospital — Baton Rouge’s ES Department from Guessing to Knowing

The aver­age hos­pi­tal envi­ron­men­tal ser­vices depart­ment is respon­si­ble for the clean­ing and ster­il­iza­tion of hun­dreds of thou­sands of square feet dai­ly. This space includes not only patient rooms and oper­at­ing rooms, but stair­ways, wait­ing rooms, hall­ways, and ele­va­tors as well. Deter­min­ing the num­ber of ES techs need­ed to accom­plish this, and know­ing every square inch of the hos­pi­tal is clean, are chal­lenges fac­ing most EVS depart­ments. In the case of Woman’s Hos­pi­tal in Baton Rouge, this bal­ance was achieved with the imple­men­ta­tion of ES Opti­miz­er, a web-based envi­ron­men­tal ser­vices soft­ware.

THE CHALLENGE: MAKING DECISIONS WITHOUT A CLEAR PICTURE

Johnathan Lan­dor has been the Direc­tor of Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices at Woman’s Hos­pi­tal in Baton Rouge since 2014. With the largest NICU in the U.S. and more than 8,000 babies born each year, his great­est chal­lenge was know­ing the full scale of what need­ed to be done and how many FTEs were required to do it. Before the intro­duc­tion of ES Opti­miz­er, even with the use of sophis­ti­cat­ed spread­sheets, cal­cu­lat­ing this num­ber was left large­ly to guess­work.

The open­ing of a new three-floor breast and GYN can­cer pavil­ion and the hir­ing of a new facil­i­ty man­ag­er pre­sent­ed the per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to intro­duce a new sys­tem for opti­miz­ing labor, stream­lin­ing sched­ul­ing, and improv­ing employ­ee engage­ment.

THE SOLUTION: ES OPTIMIZER, A SOFTWARE THAT CAPTURES THE FULL SCALE

After an online demon­stra­tion of ES Optimizer’s capa­bil­i­ties, Lan­dor quick­ly decid­ed it was time to adapt the ES man­age­ment soft­ware. Expe­ri­enced ES Con­sul­tants from Smart Facil­i­ty Soft­ware (SFS) arrived to sur­vey the hos­pi­tal on site and build a data­base of every clean­able space in the facil­i­ty. Build­ing this data­base was accom­plished in only two weeks by the SFS team, a task that Lan­dor said would nor­mal­ly take up to four months using spread­sheets.

As well as map­ping out the hospital’s clean­ing areas in pre­cise detail, ES Opti­miz­er allowed Lan­dor to:

• Deter­mine opti­mal staffing lev­els and sched­ule per­son­nel.
• Sup­port employ­ee morale through bal­anced work assign­ments.
• Keep track of employ­ee train­ing require­ments and com­pli­ance.
• Doc­u­ment tasks and cre­ate reports quick­ly and eas­i­ly.
• Con­duct reg­u­lar qual­i­ty inspec­tions on mobile devices.
• The depth of infor­ma­tion com­piled by ES Opti­miz­er allowed Lan­dor to paint a full pic­ture of the department’s needs and fill in the gaps.

THE RESULTS: EFFICIENCY, ENGAGEMENT AND INFLUENCE

Cost Savings and Efficiency

Right from the begin­ning, Landor’s depart­ment expe­ri­enced cost sav­ings. Before, deter­min­ing the num­ber of Full-Time Employ­ees (FTEs) need­ed was most­ly left up to past expe­ri­ence and guess­work. The clear pic­ture pro­vid­ed by ES Optimizer’s staffing mod­els demon­strat­ed exact­ly how many employ­ees were need­ed to main­tain clean­ing qual­i­ty. They actu­al­ly found they had three extra FTEs. This allowed him to ful­ly staff the new can­cer pavil­ion with­out increas­ing tech­ni­cians’ work­loads or adding any new FTEs.

Employees are More Engaged

As with any sys­tem­at­ic change, there was a short peri­od of adjust­ment and employ­ee push­back, but Lan­dor not­ed that his employ­ees quick­ly grew to like their new sched­ules and find more mean­ing in their work. The pre­vi­ous­ly over­worked NICU team appre­ci­at­ed their more man­age­able work­load, which was accom­plished by real­lo­cat­ing staff from less pro­duc­tive assign­ments to more pro­duc­tive areas using ES Optimizer’s fair, bal­anced work assign­ments.

“Every­body knows what they are sup­posed to do.” — Johnathan Lan­dor

Work sched­ules became more struc­tured and began to “tell a sto­ry” of a day at the Woman’s Hos­pi­tal, with min­i­mal sur­pris­es or uncer­tain­ty. The hos­pi­tal, as a result, is notice­ably clean­er, with even low­er pri­or­i­ty area cleans receiv­ing more atten­tion. “Every­body knows what they are sup­posed to be doing,” says Lan­dor. He has also noticed improved sat­is­fac­tion and engage­ment in super­vi­sors and man­agers.

The recent­ly hired Oper­a­tions Man­ag­er, who was new to envi­ron­men­tal ser­vices, imme­di­ate­ly adapt­ed to ES Opti­miz­er. He said it helped him learn his job due to the struc­ture it pro­vid­ed and made it easy for him to sched­ule project work.

“Before we were just using past expe­ri­ence. Now we know.” — Johnathan Lan­dor

Director Saves Time and is Better Equipped to Influence Administration

Replac­ing spread­sheets with ES Optimizer’s report­ing tools has sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced the amount of time spent prepar­ing for meet­ings by putting project sched­ules at his fin­ger­tips. The data gen­er­at­ed by ES Opti­miz­er makes it easy for him to high­light the con­tri­bu­tions of the ES depart­ment and com­mu­ni­cate, in hard num­bers, the department’s spe­cif­ic needs. “It brings so much struc­ture when we’re under pres­sure from a labor stand­point,” says Lan­dor, “or when we’re asked to do new things.” ES Optimizer’s train­ing mod­ule records have sig­nif­i­cant­ly cut the amount of time required to assem­ble report­ing for the Joint Com­mis­sion.

“My hospital is cleaner. My employees are happier.”

Lan­dor believes that this increased sat­is­fac­tion and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty was instru­men­tal to the Woman’s Hos­pi­tal ES depart­ment receiv­ing an Hon­or­able Men­tion for the AHE 2018 Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices Depart­ment of the Year Award. He con­sid­ers imple­ment­ing ES Opti­miz­er to be one of his crown­ing achieve­ments in his four years at the hos­pi­tal.

After only a six-month peri­od of using ES Opti­miz­er, Woman’s Hos­pi­tal has dra­mat­i­cal­ly improved the effi­cien­cy and job sat­is­fac­tion of its ES depart­ment and made the facil­i­ty clean­er. Lan­dor plans to add to this suc­cess by adding ES Ser­vice Opti­miz­er and improv­ing the abil­i­ty of man­agers to com­mu­ni­cate with ES techs in real time over mobile devices.

LEARN MORE ABOUT SMART FACILITY SOFTWARE

Found­ed in 1986, SFS is con­sid­ered the indus­try expert for in Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices Man­age­ment and Tech­nol­o­gy. Our web-based soft­ware prod­ucts include:

The Industry’s Pre­mier Soft­ware used by over 950 Hos­pi­tal ES Depart­ments Every Day.	The Mobile Add-on that con­nects ES Tech­ni­cians to ES Optimizer’s Task Man­age­ment Appli­ca­tion.	The Soft­ware to Eas­i­ly Build and Con­duct Any Sur­vey, Any­time, Any­where.

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