River View Surgical Center
River View Surgical Center, located in Marion, Indiana, provides outpatient surgical services, primarily to residents of Grant and its surrounding counties. Physicians who perform the surgeries and medical procedures are individuals who have been granted facility privileges, but are not employees of the center. Their areas of expertise and the types of services they deliver range from cosmetic and plastic surgery to gastroenterology, OB/GYN, ophthalmology, orthopedic and pain management, to name a few.
Among River View's in-house staff, there are nearly forty employees; made up by a pool of clerical and administrative personnel, such as insurance billing and coders, accounts collectors, and schedulers. Additionally, there is a clinical staff consisting of 20+ RNs and technicians that makes up the majority of the center's employees. And of River View's staff, the vast majority are compensated with hourly pay, as opposed to salary. This means that staff time must "measured” to ensure individuals are appropriately compensated for the number of hours they work each pay period. The method utilized by the center to collect employee time and attendance since opening its doors has been paper timesheet forms – a sharp contrast with the otherwise progressive technologies the center uses to streamline procedures and provide state-of-the-art services.
"We knew we needed to adopt a more efficient method for managing employee time and payroll," says Executive Director Craig Miller, explaining that his business manager and clinical coordinator were spending a inordinate amount of time processing timesheets and, that could be better spent in more productive, profit-generating ways.
"There are only seven people on my staff, but Dixie our clinical coordinator, covers the rest," explains Business Manager Rebecca Schultz. "Each payroll period, Dixie was spending at least four hours calculating the hours worked by her staff of some 20+ RNs and technicians. That's a full half-day of clinical time we were losing every two weeks."
While attending a FASA conference, Miller liked a fingerprint timecard system at award-winning Chicago developer Count Me In, LLC's booth.
After a brief presentation and demonstration by the company's vice president of marketing and sales, Miller was extremely impressed with Timecard Monitor and, armed with product literature, returned to Indiana where he contacted the company and "promptly "closed the deal."
Shortly after, the system was up and running and Miller says that he and the entire staff couldn't be more pleased.
"Initially there were some reservations from frontline staff," admits Miller. "But once I explained that the system was being implemented exclusively to improve the efficiency and productivity of our administrative team and not to keep tabs on them, or because of any other employee-trust issues, it alleviated their concerns."
While River View Surgical Center is fortunate enough to have a "really good, loyal and hard-working staff,” others are less so. For those organizations experiencing fraudulent time-reporting or time-theft, biometric systems go well-beyond saving time. In fact, these systems save many organizations, healthcare as well as business and other industry enterprises, thousands each year in "stolen” payroll dollars alone. And, the proprietary technology exclusive to Count Me In's LightningID identification engine ensures a level of unsurpassed accuracy. While the majority of biometric application providers offer systems that verify a user's identity, Timecard Monitor and its companion products provide identity authentication.
The difference is significant: With verification, cards and other "coded credentials” require users to tell the system who they are through passwords, PINs (personal identification numbers), and the like. This credential is than compared to the biometric trait to confirm or deny a match between the two. On the other hand, authentication compares the biometric trait each time the individual "logs-in” to the original sample he or she provided when being enrolled into the system.
As such, the system cannot be compromised by the sharing of cards, PINs or passwords among individuals who, during a friend's absence might be inclined to clock-in for an absent co-worker – an act commonly referred to as "buddy-punching.”
With their new time-tracking software, River View's clinical coordinator now spends only a few minutes a day reconciling employee time and simply runs the report at the close of each payroll period.
"Instead of half a day, Dixie spends around 30 minutes each pay period,” says Schultz. "She also uses the program to aide in scheduling and we have plans to eventually utilize its capabilities for other data-collection, documentation, and analysis towards achieving greater efficiencies and further cost reductions. Plus, now that it's all done by a computer, the human error factor is completely eliminated, so there's never any worry about mathematical mistakes that carry-over to payroll.”
