Staffing in Senior Care: Meeting ACA Requirements

At 2,409 pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is far-reaching, to say the least. One of the most pressing areas within the healthcare law is the employer mandate, which requires large employers to offer health benefits to full-time equivalent workers or face a penalty. This has put your part-time/full-time employee mix in the spotlight, like never before.

As a long-term care and senior living provider, you are no doubt accustomed to relying on part-time healthcare workers. But what’s changing is the emphasis you must now put forth in managing your workers. In particular, you must pay careful attention to managing your part-time work hours to the ACA requirements of 30-hours/week or 130 hours/month on average.

This is where the new release of OnShift staff scheduling and labor management software can help. We are thrilled to have just introduced new capabilities that are predictive and proactive, helping you to manage part-time and full-time employee hours to comply with your ACA policies, avoiding additional costs and unplanned penalties.

The new capabilities extend across scheduling and labor management practices. With OnShift, schedulers can clearly identify who’s part-time and who’s full-time when they are creating and managing schedules. What’s more, OnShift predicts, tracks and alerts schedulers about part-time work-hour overages before an employee is assigned a shift, so the overage can be avoided.

With current processes, which are often manual and paper-based, this information is just not available. Schedulers may know in their heads who’s part-time and who’s full-time, but they lack an understanding of hours scheduled and worked by part-time and full-time designation. Extra hours tick up, and part-timers often slip through the cracks and inadvertently cross into full-time status.

The new OnShift capabilities extend to open shift management, so part-time impact can be considered when selecting the best fit replacement. And, new reporting and the ability to define part-time work hour thresholds by individual employee helps you to maintain part-time status during a measurement period.

The costs and consequences of not managing your part-time/full-time employee mix are great. Key provisions of the Affordable Care Act go into effect January 1, 2014, but now is a critical time to ramp up policies, systems and procedures, especially as many organizations face look-back measurement periods based on 2013. In fact, from now on, every month could be part of a look-back period for a benefit year in the future.

I encourage you to check out the new release from OnShift to help with your employer mandate efforts. In addition, we’ve put together a range of resources to assist you with learning more about workforce strategies and healthcare reform.