Healthcare Summary
A Healthy Approach to Managing Employee Time & Attendance
"Physicians in private practice are grappling with the challenge of balancing their roles as physicians and business owners. In fact, nearly one in four say they would not have opened their own medical practice if they fully understood the business challenges of running a practice when they began their careers," said J. Max Reiboldt, CPA, medical practice management specialist and author of Financial Management of the Medical Practice , a publication written for the American Medical Association.
Among the issues considered most challenging, a survey commissioned by American Express' OPEN (a division of the financial products company that serves small business owners) ranked staffing concerns number one, with employee time and attendance topping the list as being both the most difficult to manage and as having the most serious consequences.
Eileene Trace, office manager for Dr. Mark Tornatore's practice, Victor Dental Care in upstate New York , said that when they relied on the honor system – with employees recording hours on timesheets each pay period – payroll accuracy was compromised.
"It became apparent that personal time and sick and vacation days weren't being reported on an all too frequent basis," says Trace, contending that high overhead costs were not the only ramifications. "It also had a negative affect on employee productivity and office morale."
The straw that broke the camel's back occurred when the doctor was adding up timesheet hours for payroll. As he calculated each form, he noted that his chairside assistant, who earlier that week failed to return from lunch, had claimed 100 percent of her scheduled hours. This was, says Trace, a clear sign that it was time for a change.
"The act was so blatant, it made us realize that failing to address the problem could ultimately undermine the practice," says Trace.
For Jerry Weisgrau, director of information services for Eden Park Health Services, the parent company of 13 nursing homes on the east coast and in Florida , the chief concern was wasted employee time.
"At each of our nursing homes there was one punch-clock installed on the entry level," says Weisgrau. 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."
Weisgrau also believed the time spent processing timecards was excessive and considered it a waste of valuable time that could otherwise be spent productively on core business matters.
"There were so many redundant tasks and duplications 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.
While electronic timeclocks and handwritten timesheets were once the norm, Dr. Michael Schey, a podiatrist with five offices in Metropolitan Detroit, also believed there had to be a better way.
"For years, we were relying on timesheet forms. Employees would fill them out, entering the hours they worked each shift," explains Schey. But almost every pay period, there was at least one timesheet where I couldn't decipher what the employee had written."
This put payroll processing on-hold, until, explains Schey, the employee was tracked down and could ‘decode' the entry. Schey was also skeptical about the validity of information being reported.
"Most employees would fill-out timesheets at the end of a pay period – once every two weeks, instead of after each shift. They were relying on memory and so I questioned whether the hours reported were those employees had been scheduled to work or, if they really reflected the number of hours actually worked. Since this is the basis of payroll, it's obviously, an area of concern."
Echoing his sentiments is Lorinda Fraboni, IS manager of operations at Walman Optical, the nation's largest independent ophthalmic company, who shares concerns similar to Schey's.
"Our primary objective was a reduction in the excessive amounts of time and labor we'd been investing on timecard data entry tasks. Equally important was eliminating a high rate of administrative errors and the prevention of buddy-punching," says Fraboni, in reference to a common form of time-theft where employees punch-in for tardy or absent co-workers.
Each one of the aforementioned healthcare industry professionals switched to automated time-tracking. And, after considerable research and trials, all found their final solutions with Count Me In's QuickBooks-compatible software and fingerprint recognition technology.
While managing time and attendance of Walman Optical's 800 employees or Eden Park's nearly 1,500 nursing home workers might appear to require a different approach and more extensive capabilities than those used by private physician practices like those of Schey's Medical Center Podiatry or Tornatore's Victor Dental Care, they are in fact, essentially the same. The core technology revolves around award-winning developer, Count Me In, LLC's Timecard Monitor. This comprehensive software application, incorporated with an exclusive LightningID fingerprint identification engine "clocks-in" employees' real-time arrivals and departures as it authenticates their identities – all with two taps of a finger. With seven different editions available, any healthcare organization, regardless of practice specialty or size, can enjoy the benefits of the system. Based on interviews with these healthcare professionals as well as testimony from hundreds of other business owners, it's clear they are.
