Digital Transformation of a Manual Timekeeping Process through Automation

As healthcare delivery has evolved, the quality of care has become a major issue for both the healthcare system and the nursing profession (Choi et al. 2014). Nurse staffing is one factor that can strongly impact the quality of care in clinical settings (Aiken et al.
2002).

In order to quantify nurse staffing with quality of care, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) implemented a new electronic time and attendance system. Through the implementation of this system, the institution adopted a new timekeeping policy which requires all nursing staff to electronically report their work hours in real time. Nurses’ time is now systematically captured and stored in the new system via badge readers.
MSK also has contracted travel nurses. Travel nurses are experienced RNs contracted through a healthcare staffing agency to take travel assignments, typically 13 weeks in duration, to fill critical staffing needs. (Bethel, et al. 2019).

However, the travel nurses time entry process remained largely manual since travel nurse time is submitted through a separate third-party timekeeping system. The manual workflow of nursing operations is to run a report out of the time and attendance system for all travel nurse clocking’s and pay codes and enter all data, day by day, into the third-party timekeeping system.

This workflow is time-consuming, inefficient, and has potential for transcription errors.
Our analysis identified this process took about 28 hours during each two-week payroll cycle.

After the implementation of the new time and attendance system, nursing informatics and nursing operations partnered to automate the manual data entry process for travel nurse time.

The nursing informatics team performed a gap analysis and worked with nursing operations to design a specification file for an integration from MSK’s new time and attendance system into the third-party travel nurse timekeeping system.

The integration queried the clocking and pay code data for each travel nurse in MSK’s time and attendance system and then loaded the data into a .csv file. The file is then encrypted and transmitted to the travel nurses’ timekeeping system using a secure FTP each pay period.

This poster will demonstrate an enhanced and efficient workflow of a fully automated data entry process between MSK’s time and attendance system and the third-party travel nurse timekeeping system. We will also demonstrate improved and more timely data collection to measure nurse staffing and quality of care.