We are honoured and delighted to have won an award for our work with the innovative team at Kantonsspital Baden AG (KSB) at the 12th anniversary of The Rotthaus KlinikAward in Berlin this past October. In collaboration with the KSB team, our state-of-the-art MatchingCore® was deployed in a record-breaking 14 days, to streamline and mitigate inefficiencies in workforce planning for their vaccination centres at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Take a brief journey with us as we share insights into our award-winning work and find out about how AI can be used in resource planning to help your company prepare for the future of work.
The problem
The KSB team’s manual planning capacity was pushed to its limits when they were tasked with vaccination resource planning during the pandemic. Individual vaccination centres in Switzerland had to set up and get schedules organised as quickly as possible to ensure that the plan of the national vaccination campaign was not jeopardised. However, there was no solution offered to the vaccination centres to schedule the staff, which included many part-time volunteers. The fluctuating availability of vaccines and the inconsistent staff availability (of diverse qualifications) made the process of planning, scheduling and rolling out vaccinations untenable with manual planning processes.
Our solution
aspaara AG equipped the KSB vaccination centres with our AI-enabled planning software MatchingCore® to address their planning problem within two weeks. MatchingCore® allowed the staff and volunteers to plan their own work assignments based on their qualifications and preferences. Our AI-driven algorithm ensured that these rosters were appropriately planned while simultaneously offering complete flexibility, as MatchingCore® can adapt quickly to any changes in schedule. This allowed optimal utilisation of staff, volunteers and vaccine doses and agility organisation during this endeavour of national importance.
The personnel planners were also supported in the creating short-term adjustments such as absences due to illness or overtime. The planning of the vaccination process became more flexible while maintaining consideration of the individual preferences of the staff and volunteers. As a result, MatchingCore® supported KSB’s planning teams to make optimal staffing decisions that propelled the vaccination programme into an efficient rollout.
The results
Due to our seamless integration and collaboration with KSB’s innovative and committed team, they were able to reach even more people than they had hoped for during the Covid-19 crisis. After six and a half months, the 100,000th Covid-19 vaccination was administered at the Königsfelden Vaccination Centre. Subsequently, over the course of 14 months at the 3 KSB vaccination centres, more than 300,000 vaccine doses were administered efficiently.
Our success story
aspaara deployed the MatchingCore® solution within two weeks, including staff and planner training and integration into the KSB’s existing planning infrastructure. Our most notable achievements were:
Utilisation: 89% of shifts are now allocated fully automatically using the new system.
Fairness of distribution: Depending on the number of working days submitted by the employees, they were guaranteed a certain number of days. This increases the fairness of the workload distribution.
Agility: The requested shifts fluctuated up to 53% over the weeks (depending on vaccine availability). Despite this fluctuation, we achieved a 90% utilisation rate.
A critical additional component to our success story is that no other solution evaluated by KSB would have been able to adapt as quickly nor would have adjusted as easily to the scheduling of staff dynamically enough to meet their requirements. This success story could not have happened without the hard work and dedication of all the healthcare workers involved in the vaccination programme. At its heart, our MatchingCore® solution is people-centred, and its day-to-day efforts support people in achieving their goals.
Our road to the Rotthaus KlinikAward 2022
The Rotthaus KlinikAward celebrates and recognises the achievements of clinics, hospitals and other healthcare-related institutions and strives to promote knowledge exchange and sharing of experiences within the healthcare industry by highlighting excellent best practice examples. Considered the “Oscars” of clinic management, the Rotthaus KlinikAward received a record number of applications and an international jury of industry experts selected a pool of 60 nominees.
The nominees gathered at the Clinic Marketing Congress in Berlin in October 2022, preceding the awards ceremony. Here, we and the other nominees presented our work elevator pitch-style to a panel of judges and fielded questions about our projects. We then presented our work to the rest of the congress attendees. A unique feature of these awards is that the winners are selected from both judges’ votes, as well as a public vote open to all the congress attendees, who represent an international community of industry experts within healthcare. As a result of this process, our collaboration with KSB was honoured with the Klinik Award for "efficient healthcare management".
Looking towards the future
We are exceedingly proud to continue our work with the KSB team towards building “the hospital of the future”. KSB is a leading hospital and an innovator in its field. Working with KSB has been a pleasure and we're excited for what's next!
The Klinik Award win represents a world of possibility for what we can achieve in healthcare. We are looking forward to continuing the use of AI to help more hospitals and clinics to better plan their resources, reduce costs and improve employee happiness.
To find out how aspaara can give your healthcare planning team superpowers, contact us: welcome@aspaara.com
Download the project overview in German.