New product features and capabilities, powered by AI/ML, focus on forecasting staffing needs, reducing administrative burden, and improving the patient and provider experience for understaffed hospitals 

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — December 6, 2023 — LeanTaaS, Inc., the market leader in providing AI-powered and SaaS-based capacity management, staffing, and patient flow software for health systems, today unveiled new product enhancements for its iQueue solution suite that will address the industry’s most pressing concerns. With tight margins and staffing shortages continuing to impact care delivery for the foreseeable future, including 33% more open nursing roles now than three years ago and an impending  90K physician shortage, healthcare organizations must do more with less. LeanTaaS developed and launched its new product enhancements as a result of direct feedback from its large customer base of 185 health systems and over 1,000 hospitals and centers who are increasingly leaning on AI to address workforce challenges. These new enhancements reduce administrative burden, forecast staffing needs, right-size and optimize staff assignments, and reduce daily chaos by predicting and matching supply and demand. The announcement was made at LeanTaaS’ sixth hospital operations virtual summit, Transform, hosted in partnership with Becker’s Healthcare. The new product enhancements include: 

New iQueue for Operating Rooms Features

• Staff Forecast: A new tool within the Staffing module, Staff Forecast predicts hourly staffing needs days and weeks in advance, providing data-driven insights and enabling leaders to proactively align staffing to demand. A predictive model forecasts precise OR demand, considering factors such as future case volume, surgeon booking patterns, and even cases that may run long. Using historical data patterns, the model also identifies when additional staff will be required for specific procedures or for specific surgeons. The tool integrates with workforce management systems and the EHR to ensure supply is also well-understood; this means staff availability and scheduled shifts are automatically kept up-to-date, and managers have full insight into staff experience and case history to ensure the appropriate skill-mix for the predicted demand is available or to identify potential gaps in advance. The end result is a comprehensive understanding of future staffing needs, which allows perioperative teams to run surgical spaces more efficiently with fewer patient care delays, happier staff, managers, and surgeons, alongside reduced staffing costs.
• Case Length Forecast: This forecast tool is an enhancement to iQueue for Operating Room’s existing Case Length Finder tool and leverages advanced machine learning (ML) to optimize scheduling accuracy. It provides OR leaders with notifications of upcoming cases that are highly likely to be over or under scheduled that need to be reviewed and corrected in the daily huddle. Case Length Forecast is able to provide accurate estimations for complex and multi-panel cases by analyzing the free text procedure descriptions to extract valuable insights beyond past case averages. Having accurately scheduled cases reduces staff burnout and patient dissatisfaction, as cases that run longer than scheduled result in delayed starts for subsequent cases and often unscheduled overtime. 
• Form Automation: Launching in 2024, this tool totally eliminates the need for any transcription when entering case information. It uses generative AI to parse information from scanned images, pdfs, and handwritten forms to intelligently fill out a surgery booking request and can even use insights from clinical notes to determine special needs and equipment requests.

New iQueue for Infusion Centers Feature

• Patient Assignment: This new feature is a dynamic and adaptable tool designed to revolutionize and support nursing assignment methods. From push to pull, and pre-assignment, the flexible solution accommodates all approaches, and charge nurses now have the power to gain a holistic view of the entire center and each nurse’s workload in real-time, enabling strategic decision-making. The tool goes beyond traditional assignment methods, providing intelligent, AI-driven recommendations for nurse-patient matches based on factors such as patient load, acuity, and assignment timing. This advanced system also allows for proactive and reactive assignment strategies by identifying checked-in patients and those pending arrival. Furthermore, it offers a detailed patient profile, including associated drug names, appointment details, provider information, acuity levels, wait times, and chair availability. The ability to re-assign nurses adds an extra layer of flexibility. 

New iQueue for Inpatient Flow Features

• Multi-tiered Staffing: As health systems scale in size and complexity, clinical staffing requires a strategic yet efficient approach. The multi-tiered staffing feature meets this need with a team-based approach that organizes clinical staff across three levels. Providing the highest-level view, the System Level looks at staffing needs across all hospitals and care units in a health system, allocating a certain number of nurses, aides, and other staff to each hospital based on patient demand. The next tier, the Hospital Level, distributes the staff assigned to that hospital across different care units like the ER, ICU, medical units, etc, allocating staff based on each unit’s policies and needs. Finally, the Unit-Level tier automates staff allocation within each unit to match specific shift schedules, overtime needs, and staff cancellation rules.
• Nurse Assignments: The innovative Nurse Assignment feature brings strategic visibility and equity to daily staffing. Going beyond manual processes, the system incorporates intelligent algorithms that factor in patient demand along with nurse skills, specialties, floating statuses, and patient acuity. With these insights, nurse managers can equitably distribute patient assignments to balance workloads and maximize safety. The system ensures nurses are no longer assigned all high-needs or low-needs patients in a single shift. This transparency around equitable assignments reduces burnout risks and enables care teams to focus fully on delivering quality outcomes. By seamlessly matching the right clinical resources to patient needs, our nurse assignment optimization allows hospitals to optimize staff capacity and care quality.

“Staffing shortages have been a major issue within healthcare for a long time, and the pandemic only exacerbated this crisis. We have reached a point where traditional stop-gap approaches, like hiring and retention strategies, are no longer enough now, let alone in several years when the shortages will be even worse. Healthcare must embrace the major role that AI has to play in solving the workforce challenge,” said Mohan Giridharadas, Founder and CEO of LeanTaaS. “Our new product enhancements were specifically designed to help healthcare leaders and the frontline anticipate what is coming, accurately plan for staffing needs, reduce cognitive overload by making intelligent recommendations, and allow staff to operate at the top of their license.”

According to the American Hospital Association (AHA), hospitals’ labor costs increased by 20.8% from 2019 through 2022. LeanTaaS continues to drive innovation and lead the industry in providing tangible solutions that clinicians actually find helpful to alleviate the industry’s biggest financial and workforce challenges. In 2023, LeanTaaS became the first HealthTech unicorn of the year with a new valuation of $1 billion and now serves over 1,000 hospitals and centers. On average, LeanTaaS customers see an annual impact from iQueue of performing 30-50 more cases per OR per year, a mean increase of 6% in case volume; an additional $20k/infusion chair annually; and an additional $10k/inpatient bed annually.

About LeanTaaS

LeanTaaS provides software solutions that combine lean principles, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and machine learning to transform hospital and infusion center operations. The company’s software is being used by 185 health systems across the nation, which rely on the iQueue cloud-based solutions to increase patient access, decrease wait times, reduce healthcare delivery costs, and improve revenue. LeanTaaS is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA with an office in Charlotte, NC. For more information about LeanTaaS, please visit https://leantaas.com/, and connect on LinkedIn and X.

Media Contact

Kate Soden
leantaas@pancomm.com