Hours per patient day, or HPPD, is a key metric for a wide variety of healthcare facilities, from hospitals and clinics to long-term care providers like skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). Besides measuring time spent on patient care, it also gives employers the chance to optimize staffing budgets, cut unnecessary costs, and improve patient care.
As more and more states implement minimum requirements, here’s what leaders should know about the hours-per-patient-day (HPPD) metric and how to successfully manage it.
What Is HPPD and How Is It Calculated?
So, what is HPPD? An acronym for “hours per patient day,” HPPD calculates the number of hours worked by nurses or aides in relation to the number of patients within a facility at a given time. (A similar term, “hours per resident day,” or HPRD, is used for nursing homes and LTC facilities.) To calculate HPPD or HPRD, simply divide the number of hours logged by any individual worker by the number of patients in that facility that day.
Of course, most employers know HPPD and HPRD very well, particularly in settings where it’s also required by state law. By showing how much time is spent caring for each patient, tracking HPPDs and HPRDs as a workforce metric can help leaders measure efficiency and productivity. Additionally, it helps them better understand how to make improvements that can impact their bottom line.
Tracking HPPD also helps labor resource optimization, showing employers where staff may be under- or over-utilized, so they can make the appropriate corrections. However, this optimization doesn’t just cut costs and help optimize the labor budget. It can also elevate quality of care and satisfaction by contributing to the improved outcomes that so often come with more focused care.
Why Managing HPDD Is Essential for Healthcare Employers
In addition to a more optimized, efficient, and cost-effective clinical and nursing workforce, closely managing hours-per-patient-day gives healthcare employers a host of additional benefits. As an article from ShiftMed reveals, these benefits include:
#1: Delivering Optimal Care
Tracking HPPD gives facility managers more power to detect situations where a patient or resident may not be receiving the proper level of care and order the appropriate interventions.
#2: Promoting Safety
From bed sores to missed medication, facilities that fail to track hours per patient day may miss critical information about patients or residents that can put safety at risk. Proper management of HPPD can also help leaders more closely measure other important metrics affecting safety, such as patient length of stay.
#3: Improving Workforce Management
By revealing when staff is over or under-utilized — individually or collectively — monitoring hours per patient day also enables key staffing improvements at a time when labor costs are front of mind for many healthcare employers.
#4: Staying Compliant with Regulatory Standards
Hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities must meet specific HPPD/HPRD targets to retain accreditation, and stay current with any local, state, or federal workforce regulations.
#5: Ensuring Financial Stability
Tracking HPPD helps employers better manage workforce costs by optimizing the use of staff, and helps them avoid the financial penalties that may come from missing any applicable requirements.
#6: Identifying Areas of Improvement
At a time when budgets are often tight, more closely managing HPPD can give employers important insights into bottlenecks and other roadblocks to efficiency. It can also give a better understanding of how to manage seasonal fluctuations and abrupt shifts in patient census.
#7: Improving Budget and Workforce Planning
Lastly, closely managing HPPD helps employers better understand the finer points of their workforce spend and the precise cost of patient and resident care, helping improve long-term planning and financial stability.
Solutions to Manage Hours-Per-Patient-Day
Given the many benefits it provides, managing HPPD isn’t just a good idea but an operational necessity. Yet with all the complexities involved, such as fluctuating staff, patient demographics, and open beds. It can also be a difficult task — both for larger facilities with hundreds of thousands of worker hours to monitor, and for smaller organizations that may not have the infrastructure to manage their own teams.
Of course, at its most fundamental level, managing HPPD is simply a matter of tracking hours worked. Today’s electronic-based scheduling makes this, on its face, a straightforward task. Yet to seize the benefits outlined above, employers must not only compile this data but also review and assess it on an ongoing basis.
For that reason, many healthcare organizations now turn to workforce management experts to carry out the finer points of not just tracking HPPD but effectively defining and managing their larger labor goals. These specialists provide other key benefits, too, like access to a network of contractors available as W-2 employees and managing all compliance and reporting obligations associated with those workers.
For instance, CareerStaff offers employers a more flexible staffing model while gaining more control over labor costs. With powerful workforce solutions like Managed Services (MSP) and top-quality clinical staff, we can help your facility not only meet HPPD goals but also:
- Streamline recruitment and credentialing of new professionals
- Expedite onboarding to place nurses and other workers more quickly
- Reduce the burden of multi-system scheduling
- Automate key aspects of the staffing process to drive administrative efficiency
Stay on Top of HPPD & Other Key Metrics with CareerStaff
Successfully managing HPPD is essential for ensuring optimal patient care, financial stability, and regulatory compliance — yet it’s also a bigger challenge than ever before. Powered by ShiftMed, CareerStaff is proud to provide the tools employers need to get this important job done, as well as optimizing every aspect of your healthcare workforce management efforts.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you better manage hours-per-patient-day and get the most from your workforce investment, or get started by requesting staff now.