ECU Health Transforms Workforce Strategy with In-House Stability Dashboard

Headquartered in Nags Head, North Carolina, ECU Health faces workforce challenges that aren’t uncommon among health systems serving rural areas, according to a recent Becker’s Hospital Review article. In addition to financial pressures and talent pipeline issues, ECU anticipates a surge of retirements across the system.

The health system has decided not to wait and respond to these types of workforce shifts and trends until after their impact becomes evident. Instead, the ECU Health team now has unprecedented insight into these developments, thanks to a new internally developed dashboard that consolidates real-time data from across the organization, allowing leadership to rapidly identify problems and respond before the situation becomes dire.

ECU Health’s Department Stability Index (DSI) aggregates real-time data from nine platforms and tracks vacancy, turnover, patient experience, contract labor, safety incidents and workplace aggression. Each department’s status is displayed as green, yellow or red.

“The goal is not to do what we used to do, which was have the conversation when everybody’s in red and things are already overwhelming,” Vickie Williford, a human resources business partner at ECU Health, told Becker’s. “The goal is to have the conversation when something moves into yellow, to ask what’s triggering it, what’s a little off, how can we help support that leader now, so they don’t get to red. If they do reach red, we know it’s coming in advance instead of being caught off guard.”

The dashboard enables ECU Health to make new connections and achieve a more proactive and agile workforce management strategy.

Takeaways from ECU Health’s Department Stability Index

ECU Health’s experience implementing the DSI can serve as a model for other health systems looking to proactively identify and address workforce challenges. Here are a few key takeaways:

• Eliminating data silos streamlines decision-making. ECU Health previously held all the data displayed on the dashboard, but it resided in separate systems. Aggregating it in one place allows leadership to see the big picture more quickly.
• Real-time information increases organizational agility. A key advantage of the dashboard is that it gives leaders a window into ongoing operations (as opposed to quarterly examinations of outdated data), allowing them to respond to current and emerging trends.
• Build workforce tools in-house for maximum flexibility and return on investment. The ECU Health team created the DSI in-house without contracting with external vendors, and they advise other health systems to do the same. “We have amazing partners in [information services], so this is not something we paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to an outside vendor to build,” Williford told Becker’s. “We built it internally in our own dashboard, and that gives us the flexibility to change metrics and measurements as our organization evolves.”