"Often hospitals don't have that documentation and rely on the agency. Through our system you eliminate that and have all that information available in real time. Hospitals can use the software to make sure clinical credentials are up to their quality management requirements," Ondeck said. "We work with our hospitals to define what are the minimum skills requirements of someone coming into ICU or med surg, telemetry, L&D, burn, or other units. Unit by unit we help them define requirements and then use technology to make sure that every clinician that comes in meets those skills requirements."

Time tracking is also part of the solution to keep tabs on contract labor in terms of hours worked, rates and payments. All of Prolucent's solutions are web based so no hardware investment is required.


"The system eliminates overbilling by agencies and all the work hospitals used to do in a paper-based world to make sure they are paying the right nurse the right amount at the right time," he said.

In addition to managing agency labor, the other major software solution from Prolucent is a web-based core scheduling platform for internal staff. This piece was added when Prolucent recently acquired Symbio Solutions.

"The legacy scheduling platforms are not web-based so hospitals have to make significant technology investments in hardware and implementation and interfaces with core systems. And legacy systems don't interact with the agency system in an elegant way. The reason we have expanded into the core scheduling (of hospital staff as well as contract workers) is that we believe hospitals want one piece of software to determine what are the staffing needs and who among all sources of clinical labor--your employees, float pools, shared resources with sister hospitals, and agency labor--who's the best clinician from a quality and cost perspective to fill that shift? Our software will be able to accomplish that in a way we believe no other piece of software can," Ondeck said.

The company is working to integrate this internal core staffing system with its external agency platform to create the "killer app" for hospital personnel management.

When this is complete, Prolucent's offerings will become an even more valuable productivity tool.

"There is a lot of opportunity for productivity gains in the system by making sure you are not calling off nurses in one unit, while another unit works overtime. Or calling off your own employees while a sister hospital contracts with an agency," he said. "The software will allow you to move the pieces of the puzzle among units; there are huge efficiencies that can be gained with the same available resources."

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