HCA Healthcare Innovators Award Financial Impact Recipient David Chia

Culture, people and purpose. Those three things allowed David Chia and his team to create a tool that will help nurse leaders better manage their teams.

“We had three different systems to track productivity, and it was taking too much time to build reports that gave a global overview,” Chia says. “Our leaders needed more visibility of all three tools to make quick staffing decisions.”

Chia’s team set out to streamline their data into one viewing platform so departments, facilities and division leaders could view it in rich, holistic ways. Now the TimeWatch tool allows them to view time punches, pay codes and staffing schedules in a way they were never able to before.

“At a glance, leadership can see if someone needs to be talked to about overtime or needs to be let off early,” says Chia. “It also provides general trending analysis so we can see patterns of behavior we wouldn’t normally see otherwise.”

The facilities have embraced the tool, and Chia’s team has enjoyed hearing the positive feedback that’s come from the company-wide rollout.

“The amount of time each department director needs to review information has dropped from 20 percent of their day to just 3 percent,” says Chia. Some facilities conduct daily stand-up meetings with the tool displayed onscreen to discuss successes, ask who needs help and share resources across departments.

“I give so much credit to the leadership at the hospitals for taking advantage of the tool and building processes around it,” Chia says.

The fact that the tool is helping people collaborate and communicate makes the success even more meaningful for Chia.

“Often, in development there are so many silos that it’s hard for everyone to work on something,” says Chia. “This was a joint effort between Performance Improvement and CFOs, and corporate was great in providing us access to data, as well as giving us guidance when we expanded use of the tool to the whole company. This kind of collaboration reminds me why I love working at HCA Healthcare.”