Delmar Gardens uses SAMI to slash agency hours, boost employee utilization and create a modern, flexible workforce

Company Background
Delmar Gardens

Founded in 1965, Delmar Gardens provides a range of healthcare services to over 4,000 seniors in Missouri, Kansas, Georgia, Nebraska, Illinois and Nevada. Each skilled nursing or senior living community embodies a culture of heartfelt commitment, where every moment is filled with love, care, and understanding. The team is dedicated to creating positive experiences for residents and their families, ensuring every day is a celebration of a life well-lived.

Workforce goals

• Save administrators time
• Ensure building-to-building consistency and make maintaining compliance standards easier 
• Improve communication between employees and managers
• Reduce agency usage while increasing employee engagement 
• Connect with external workers who could deliver high-quality care

Key challenges

• The organization was finding it difficult to meet resident care needs without external workers 
• The local staffing agency they had been using could no longer meet their needs 
• It was difficult to stay within HPPD budgets and still deliver quality care 
• Ensuring compliance was time-consuming and frustrating

The Solution: SAMI

With SAMI, Delmar Gardens is creating a modern, flexible workforce that delivers quality care consistently

Delmar Gardens activated SAMI after realizing great efficiencies from OnShift’s workforce management software. For external workers, the team had been relying on one local agency and several national workforce technology platforms, including ShiftKey. Schedulers were already gravitating toward the ShiftKey platform due to its ease of use and reliability tools, so enabling SAMI, which connects ShiftKey to OnShift, was the logical next step. 

In keeping with their long history of dedicated service to seniors, the team’s main goal was to deliver quality care whether using external or internal workers. Several ShiftKey tools helped them achieve that aim. The first, Favorites, lets them easily identify and re-engage independent professionals who have provided excellent care to their residents. The second, Admin Assist, allows them to automatically schedule those trusted independent professionals for open shifts. Plus, OnShift’s easy-to-use scheduling solution prioritizes Delmar Gardens’ employees, notifying them of open shifts and allowing them to request openings on-the-go in the OnShift mobile app. This translated to a 239% increase in employee shift requests while reducing unfilled shifts to 3%. 

Additionally, administrators gained visibility into usage data and trends. Seeing when, where and how schedulers were using SAMI enabled the leadership team to start optimizing their workforce strategy and led to the discovery that a few buildings were having trouble with adoption. To increase consistency across buildings and make the transition easier, the OnShift Customer Success team and ShiftKey account management team arranged several in-person training sessions, which successfully brought the rest of the Delmar Gardens team on board.

The Results

More engaged employees and filled shifts, less agency usage

With SAMI, Delmar Gardens: 

• Realized a 239% increase in employee shift requests and 20% higher employee utilization, signifying a more engaged workforce. 
• Reduced unfilled shifts by 90%, helping them meet their care quality and delivery goals. 
• Saw a 71% decrease in agency usage, minimizing the time schedulers spent managing agencies.
• Discovered reliable independent professionals they could depend on and were able to re-engage as needed. 
• Increased census at several buildings with the confidence that they would have the workforce to support more residents.

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*These results are not intended to represent or guarantee that current or future users will achieve the same or similar results.