Acuity-Based Staffing

Staffing based on patient acuity is central to ensuring quality patient outcomes, a stable nursing workforce and financial viability.

Nurse staffing represents as much as 50% of a hospital’s labor costs and over 20% of total operating costs. Further, nurses provide 95% of patient care and are proven to have the greatest impact on patient outcomes. Some want to believe that staffing comes down to a numbers game, where the number of skilled staff fluctuates in accord with patient volume. But this doesn’t address patient acuity, nursing competencies, skill mix, the patient complexity of care required or the resulting workload.

To ensure positive patient outcomes, you must do more than a ratio match. When you align nurse and other staffing to your patients’ needs for care, you valuably augment nursing knowledge and judgment, and assure accurate and safe staffing, while keeping costs down. A strategic, evidence-based nurse workforce plan enables a new level of CNO and CFO partnership to support the highest possible quality of patient care, staff safety and cost management.

AcuityPlus provides evidence-based methodologies to determine the quantity of care (acuity) and type of care (complexity) required for each patient. A formal research process is conducted on a regular basis, with interim projects as needed to maintain the validity and transportability of each methodology – a unique feature in the industry, available only through Harris Healthcare.

Account for the Knowns… and the Unknowns

AcuityPlus, our Acuity-based staffing solution, uses existing clinical documentation from your electronic medical records system to classify patients. This is known as Transparent Classification. Our approach eliminates any duplication in data entry, minimizes workload for nursing staff, and eliminates any bias in patient classification. It also decreases cognitive stacking for RNs, improves data validity and results in improved documentation.