TeamBuilder | The Right Person, in the Right Place, at the Right Time | David Howard

Leveraging Data Science

After two decades of consulting, David Howard, Founder & CEO, launched TeamBuilder to solve the ongoing staffing issues that health systems face. “If it’s broken, fix it” is a theme the team regularly discusses and the team is empowered to break the status quo of how things have historically been done.

TeamBuilder leverages leading data science to predict demand and consider clinic-specific constraints and workflow to recommend the optimal staff schedule with precision down to the hour.

How do they do this?

1. They predict intraday demand. “Tomorrow”, their patent-pending TeamBuilder technology has a demand prediction algorithm that consumes historical information by provider/activity, down to the hour of the day, and has data feeds providing real-time data up to the minute.
2. They understand staff supply. TeamBuilder captures critical information on all of the staff supply. This includes licensure, experience, specialty, home location, secondary locations, preferences, availability, etc.
3. They understand the work effort required and the clinic’s constraints. “Tomorrow” considers the variable and fixed work associated with each patient visit, as well as clinic-specific constraints (e.g., minimum staffing requirements, business hours, etc.).
4. They recommend an optimal schedule. “Tomorrow’s” matching technology accounts for all the above and nudges management towards the optimal daily staff schedule. “Today”, TeamBuilder’s digital schedule, guides the manager and team through the scheduling process.

Uniquely Positioned

Physicians and practice managers are excellent at making decisions when they have access to accurate data, but the problem  in this arena is that there has been an absence of volume and workflow data to drive decision making; nor has there been a way to create a schedule that aligns staff demand with supply. TeamBuilder is able to prompt leaders towards a better staff schedule that may not have previously been clear.  This data-driven approach has helped to reduce costs while at the same time improving the staff experience.

For A Better Future

TeamBuilder’s market segment is dominated by well-known “adjacent” competitors that focus on nurse and staff scheduling in the hospital space. To date, there is no platform built specifically for the ambulatory care setting, which is a growing 55% of health system revenue. In addition to being in a space with no direct competitors, TeamBuilder keeps a close pulse on their client needs and ensures their product roadmap is aligned.

For instance, TeamBuilder’s first customer, a large medical group in New York state, was using traditional staffing approaches that looked at staff-to-provider ratios and were not equipped to manage changes in demand and flexible scheduling effectively. They were using paper schedules, managing changes using shared documents, printing schedule updates, and posting them on a bulletin board. Managing everything was cumbersome and led to confusion surrounding shift changes and schedule expectations. As a way to progress their staffing strategies and processes, they implemented TeamBuilder across a group of primary care sites. They were then able to showcase value across several different dimensions, including reduced administrative work time for managers by 50%, and payroll reductions of 8-14%, all while improving the staff experience.

TeamBuilder continues to get requests from additional care settings that provide patient care in non-hospital settings, including: virtual care, retail health, dental, and various therapies. Managing large-scale decentralized workforces is critical to these care settings and is one of the reason’s that  TeamBuilder was launched.

“Every health system right now is trying to tackle their staffing issues,” explains David.  For the first time ever, staffing has taken the number one spot for the top issues facing healthcare executives. “Getting the right person, in the right place, at the right time sounds much easier than it is – without technology like ours in place, staffing optimization is impossible to sustainably manage.”