How one hospital is using workflow automation to completely change the way they communicate with staff
Coosa Valley Medical Center is situated in Sylacauga, Alabama and is an acute care hospital with both inpatient and outpatient services.
Being in a rural area with limited resources and over 540 employees, giving people access to important and necessary information has been a challenge.
Since becoming an airSlate customer in 2021, things have changed for the better.
We spoke with Christy Knowles, Chief Human Resources Officer of CV Medical Center, to learn more.
Broadening access to information
“In a hospital, not everyone has access to email,” says Christy. “Maybe 60 percent of our staff is on email. Because of that, it’s been a challenge to communicate with everybody we employ.”
For the CV Medical Center staff, it was increasingly important to find a way to allow people to get quick access to important information. That has become especially obvious as the healthcare industry continues to face staffing shortages spurred by the pandemic.
“We were looking for a way for people to quickly communicate with HR and for HR to be able to communicate with employees,” says Christy. “Specifically, we wanted a solution that would allow us to build forms that we could send to people and they could quickly return. And airSlate has been that solution.”
When the hospital’s IT team proposed airSlate as a solution, they presented it as a one-stop-shop, which to Christy sounded different from their experience using other document workflow software.
“We had used DocuSign and Formsite previously,” says Christy. “They were good for what we needed them for, but as we grew, they just were not suitable enough. With airSlate, we see so much value for the price. We can do so much more with it – the sky’s the limit. It is a great tool.”
QR codes and forms: a new way to communicate
At CV Medical Center, airSlate is mainly being used for employee-focused paperwork. As mentioned previously, not every employee has access to email. However, almost everyone has access to smartphones. So, for every airSlate workflow or form generated, a corresponding QR code is created.
These QR codes are included on flyers all around the hospital, making it easy for anyone to quickly scan a code while they’re on the go and complete whatever task or document is needed.
airSlate document workflow automation is used for things like employee change forms, new hires, health forms that must be completed on a monthly basis, recruitment forms, incentive programs, and even housekeeping.
“It hasn’t always been easy for us to know when bathrooms need to be serviced or to communicate that to our staff,” says Christy. “Someone had the idea to put QR codes on mirror clings in the bathroom with a simple ‘yes/no this bathroom needs to be serviced’ prompt and it has significantly improved the cleanliness of our facilities. It sounds so simple but having a clean facility impacts many aspects of both the patient and employee experience.”
airSlate has enabled Christy and her team to easily create workflows that seamlessly get information into the right hands. This fall, they plan to build a workflow that solves a problem they encounter year after year.
“We struggle with getting employees to tell us whether they’ve taken the flu shot or not, which is actually critical information for accreditation purposes,” says Christy. “This fall, we’ll create a QR code that we’ll place all around the hospital for employees to quickly answer yes or no in regards to having a flu shot.”
The impact of having workflow automation software
Christy mentions that it is difficult yet imperative to connect with people, especially in healthcare. And that’s exactly what airSlate has allowed CV Medical Center to do.
“airSlate allows our people to respond immediately,” says Christy. “Before that, it was pen and paper. It took too much time to stop what we were doing and complete some form by hand. Take our incentive program for example. If someone wants to recognize a colleague for going above and beyond, they’ll turn around and see a flyer, scan the QR code, and leave a quick anecdote. If they had to go to a physical nomination box, it wouldn’t get done. With airSlate, we get a level of responsiveness and accessibility that we wouldn’t otherwise have.”
Christy believes that having such an accessible recognition program has increased retention of her staff. She’s also seeing working hours saved, specifically on the HR team, because employees are no longer spending time chasing people down. Patient satisfaction has gone up thanks to the hospital running more efficiently. And even the process of recruiting talent has improved.
“In rural hospitals like ours, resources are extremely limited,” says Christy. “I always recommend airSlate for document automation because it provides so much ability for the money. It’s one thing to connect with candidates who are coming on board, and it’s another thing to keep engaging with your staff over time. And airSlate’s automation software helps us do that. We’re just getting so much value in every way.”
