Nurses On Call
Focus on technology, class-leading service and enhanced pool of staff transforms the experience at leading nursing agency in south africa.
Nurses on Call
Nurse app for daily level management and enchancing customer trust.
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About Us
The Problem
Solution
Proposed Alternative
Benefits
HomeAbout Nurses On Call
To Infinity and Beyond!
Nurses On Call is one of the largest Nursing Agencies in South Africa. They are involved in the placement of Nurses in Public and Private Hospitals. Setting new standards of service excellence every day, Nurses on call is committed to maintaining a level of service that meets and exceeds global standards.
While Nurses on Call was mainly involved with the private sector until 2000, they have successfully expanded their services to the public sector since 2002.
An accredited BEE Level 1 provider, their success stems from the fact that they enjoy what they do.
Nurses on call combines their business acumen with their large network of qualified nursing staff, resulting in a win-win situation for their customers.
With several “Best Practice” solutions that meet their client’s needs and the capability to offload administrative tasks like processing overtime, Nurses on Call was able to reduce payroll and administrative costs. This directly resulted in tax savings for the employees.
The Problem
Lots of Manual Work
Entire process generates a lot of adminstrative work not only for nursing agency but for hospital admin staff also.
Delay in the payment
All the payment was handling manually and this cause delay in the payment and a lot of adminstration work.
Weekly work schedule
Hospitals are invoices every week for weekly work schedule supplied to them nationwide.
Hospitals contact nursing agencies like Nurses on Call, asking them for a nurse. The call center staff at the agency then proceeds to call nearly hundreds of nurses so that they can get a confirmation from a nurse.
Once they do, they then relay the confirmation to the hospital. Many times, these confirmations also result in a no-show. This also creates an inefficient overhead for the nursing agency and the hospital staff.
Coupled with the pressure to run payrolls at the end of the week and bill hospitals for the manpower supply, along with checking in-out times and corrections thereof creates a massive overhead. This inefficiency results in hundreds of hours being put in by the staff, resulting in millions of rand being spent on this manual operation.
The Existing Solution
The existing solution was a part-paper, part electronic mix-and-match operation running on age-old technologies that was highly inefficient, secure and prone to crashes.
Labourious and time consuming processes
The agency staff would call every single nurse every day, enquiring about their current work schedule and writing it down at their end so that they can route the nurse to a hospital if he or she are available. Attendance data received from the hospitals was added to a MS Access database instance that helped the company calculate weekly work hours.
Error prone
These were then pushed into the old system that would finally generate the payout for each nurse and the invoice for the hospital. The revenue model of Nurses on Call relied on this by taking a cut between hospital billing and the final payout to nurses.
The Proposed Alternative
The proposed solution would act like a double-edged sword. It would take out the inherent inefficiency of the workforce in South Africa and reduce nurse provision time from hours to seconds. An internal tool for booking nurses, an app for nurses for the management of their day, and an app for the hospital to order nurses at their own premise with a provision to still book a nurse via the phone, if need be.
Nurses in the vicinity would get an SMS/alert on their phone once the hospital makes a request for a nurse. Nurses will be able to accept the request on their phone itself. The system will ensure compliance by making periodic automated calls to improve show-up rates. Facial recognition technology reduces fraud and eliminates ambiguity from attendance data. Automated payroll processing will generate tax reports and facilitate payment disbursal daily and weekly with minimal effort.
The application was simple and minimalistic and was built keeping the regional requirements in mind. With an easy-to-use interface, it was available for use for all stakeholders. The application also leveraged SMS and voice call technology to reduce reliance on the internet due to cost constraints in South Africa.
Tech Stack
Front End
Angular
Jquery
Html5
Css3
Apache
Bootstrap
Back End
Hapi.js
Node.js
Mongo.db
Aparche 1
Communication
Mailchimp
SMS
Google Analytics
Fedora
Benefits
Reduced potential clinical incidents
Ensuring intelligent shift management and preventing double shift booking, the staff is not overworked, ensuring compliance and quality of care.
Improved timelines and Reduction of manual labor
Reduction of manual work at each level and last moment cancellation avoidance. Turnaround time for nurse confirmation is now in minutes instead of hours. AI and ML ensure high availability and predictive analytics that enhance decision making.
Clear communication
Regular notifications and alerts to keep everyone updated and ensure seamless communication between all stakeholders. Reduced clock-in fraud and time management using facial recognition technology.
Always available
Highly available systems built on Amazon Web Services that reduce downtime. compliance with labor laws that mandate maximum working hours for each nurse. Digitization and high availability of all documents required by the operations staff.
3x Revenue boost
The system has tripled the revenue of Nurses On Call. Current revenue is pegged at over 250 Rand in business per annum and aggregating nearly two million Rand per week.
Improved job prospects
The system has boosted job generation in the region and has facilitated movement of redundant staff to other areas in the company. Business has been boosted by 140% in the last three years.