Eden Park Nursing Homes
13-Facility Nursing Home Fixes Age-Old Problem of Managing Employee Time &Attendance with Biometric Time-Tracking Software
Sister-companies Eden Park Health Services and Eden Park Management own and operate nursing homes in New York State and in Connecticut , Vermont and Florida , respectively. Since the early 1950s, the organization has grown from one nursing home founded by a family seeking quality long-term care for their aging mother, into 13 facilities that staff more than 100 employees at each location. And, as the number and size of Eden Park facilities and their staffs grew, so too did the need to upgrade from electronic timeclocks to a more progressive system for managing employee time and attendance.
"At each of our nursing homes there was one punch-clock installed on the entry level," says Eden Park 's Director of Information Services Jerry Weisgrau, who works at corporate headquarters in Albany , New York . "But, when you run an operation that employs nurses, aides, occupational and physical therapists, activities staff, dieticians, maintenance, housekeeping, and laundry staff, all of whom work on different floors in various parts of the building, a system that simply acknowledges when employees enter the facility does not accurately reflect when they actually arrive on their unit and are at their stations being productive."
While Weisgrau says he's confident that the vast majority of employees acted responsibly and ethically, he expressed concerns about exceptions wasting valuable, paid-time while making their way to their respective department locations.
But, there were also additional concerns: Weisgrau and facility department heads concluded that the amount of time devoted to preprocessing payroll was excessive, as was the amount of paperwork. "There was a lot of redundancy and duplication of effort," says Weisgrau, noting that each employee's timecard hours had to be calculated daily, totaled and audited at the end of the week, and then manually entered into corporate's payroll software. Further complicating the process were inevitable human errors and a lack of accessibility to employee attendance records.
Responding to these and related challenges, Weisgrau explored options for cost-effective, company-wide automation that would also improve data integrity and accessibility. His research led him to the employee time and attendance software incorporated with a biometric interface made by Chicago-area solutions developer, Count Me In, LLC. He selected "Premier" one of the company's most advanced editions of the product for its scalability – which, with its multiple fingerprint sensors enables employees to "clock-in" at various locations, while also providing administrators with network-wide accessibility that allows them to access, reconcile and print reports from different computers on the same LAN. In addition to these advantages, Weisgrau considered the application's use of biometric technology another very strong point.
In August 2005, Eden Park Health Services' Utica facility became the first of three New York properties that installed the system, to be operational. According to Utica 's Director of Building Services Paul Gray, the multi-punch set-up and network accessibility was a huge improvement.
"We installed five scanners to accommodate the nearly 175 employees who now ‘clock-in' with a digital fingerprint each day," Gray says, explaining that there are two sensors on the ground floor – of which one is used exclusively for new enrollments – and then one at each unit's workstation on each successive floor. "This ensures that the right information gets captured on the right people and at the right place and time."
Gray says automating replaced a tedious, time-consuming, error-prone process with an accurate and efficient system, and that it does so for considerably less than it would have cost to install standard timeclocks on every floor.
"We considered installing timeclocks on each unit, but the cost was prohibitive. In addition to the cost of the unit itself, there is regular maintenance and the expense of supplies, such as ribbons and timecards that must constantly be replenished."
Gray and Weisgrau are also impressed with the system's built-in checks and balances, ensuring schedules are adhered to: "It prevents employees from checking-in early and red-flags unauthorized overtime," explains Gray.
In addition to Utica , implementation is also underway at two other New York facilities: the Cobleskill and Glens Falls nursing homes. According to Weisgrau, the program at Utica has been so successful and well-received by on-site management and their employees as well as executives at the Albany headquarters, that plans are on the table to implement the system throughout all 13 nursing homes and eventually to integrate a second Count Me In product, Door Monitor, which applies the fingerprint technology to manage facility-access control.
"As you can imagine, in any healthcare related setting, there are many sensitive areas that require restricted entry," explains Weisgrau. "Presently, the staff uses keys to access these areas but, this provides no record of who's going in or out and it certainly doesn't prevent people from losing or sharing a key. With Count Me In's fingerprint technology, these all become non-issues, providing us with an exceptional level of security. And, their timecard application is working so well for us that it makes sense to incorporate their technology in other capacities."
