Digitally revolutionizing workforce management in healthcare

COVID-19 highlighted the existing shortage in personnel within healthcare and is now challenging many hospitals with high staff turnover and sick leave. To help healthcare organizations put the employee in the focus of digitization efforts, Planerio developed an intelligent shift planning software enabled by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Delivering modern workforce management

Planerio created workforce management solutions that help healthcare organizations modernize their workforce administration. Their shift planning software uses artificial intelligence (AI) and takes into account a range of planning variables such as employee qualifications and availabilities, employee preferences and requests, requirements of different shifts and workplaces, legal regulations and tariffs, and more. Physicians, nurses, and practice managers save up to 80% of the time needed to draw up the shift plan and thus have more time for their patients.

“With our intelligent work-life management solutions, which enable fair and flexible shift planning with maximum say for the employees, we want to sustainably improve the personnel shortage and working conditions for employees in the healthcare industry,” said Markus Hinz, Planerio’s chief executive officer (CEO). “With the efficient staff deployment plan and the resulting time and satisfaction of the employees we ultimately also contribute to better patient care.”

The company hosts the platform on AWS, benefiting from the unlimited computing capacity, which is needed for functions such as automatic planning, combined with highest standards for IT and data security. The cloud has allowed Planerio to reinvent and innovate offering options like digital time recording, payroll accounting, and absence management as well as an employee self-service (ESS), all via a smartphone app.

Extending IT security and data protection, important for hospitals

Planerio extends the benefits of the AWS to its customers, so they too can leverage the same agility, capacity, and security. For example, different departments of the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Hospital in Munich uses Planerio’s personnel planning solutions.

“Before, I used to have three different planning lists for just one occupational group, from which I had to compile one shift plan,” explains Dr. Maximilian Niyazi, vice chairman of the department of radiation oncology at the LMU Hospital. “Now, the entire department with over 100 employees is organized using the same program, including automatic planning and mobile access to plan data.”

For the hospital, the topics of data protection and IT security were particularly important when choosing a shift planning software. “We cannot afford personnel shortages or even failures due to incorrect planning in the hospital,” says Dr. Niyazi. “For the wellbeing of our patients, it is important to work with a partner who guarantees us a reliability of over 99 percent and the highest level of data security.”

Supplying necessary infrastructure, availability, and security

Planerio uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to deploy and scale capabilities built by different internal teams, supporting diverse workflows across several healthcare verticals including hospitals, practices, and care facilities. AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda provide dedicated compute capacity. Planerio uses Amazon Aurora as a low-maintenance and high-availability database solution and Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (Amazon MSK) to route information with low latency to time tracking and reporting components. Integrations with other healthcare providers are secured by Amazon API Gateway.

“AWS enables us to focus on building functionality that actually helps our users, so they in turn can care for patients. Using enterprise-grade platform services such as the Aurora database or Managed Streaming for Kafka gives us a rock-solid foundation. Following the AWS Well-Architected Framework, we are able to maintain a strict security regime with several lines of defense. My favorite part of working with AWS is using Infrastructure as code to quickly replace existing services or spin up new services and prevent configuration drift,” Ingmar Runge, Planerio head of IT said.

Enabling highly secure infrastructure

For ease of use, efficient planning, and application management, Planerio’s customers can use the Planerio smartphone app. “Thanks to AWS, we can offer our customers a highly secure and always available mobile app,” says Runge. This means that the shift plan is available to the employees at any time and from any device. “Especially in times of COVID-19, in which short-term, sickness-related employee absences are to be expected much more often, the speed and high availability of the app is crucial,” explains Markus Hinz.

With the C5 attestation, AWS offers Planerio highly secure infrastructure and encryption technology to protect the stored data of healthcare employees in compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) referred in Germany as Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (DSGVO).

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