Timpani, a revolutionary platform created and customized by colleagues, is evolving the way care is delivered by ensuring that the right nurse is with the right patient at the right time.
Just like an orchestra, hospitals and their teams need to stay synchronized and on beat to achieve a shared outcome. When it came time to name HCA Healthcare’s new scheduling and staffing platform, the Digital Transformation and Innovation (DT&I) team went with Timpani — a time-keeping percussion instrument.
Aside from its memorable name, Timpani’s real impact across
HCA Healthcare is optimizing how we work in teams and ensuring the right mix of experience levels among colleagues during shifts. Since its 2023 launch across nine sites, Timpani’s automated scheduling and staffing has saved nursing leaders hundreds of hours. Nurse leaders now have more time to support their nurses, prioritize scheduling preferences and ensure patients receive the best care possible.
All aboard the Timpani Train! HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest had the creative ticket to innovative engagement for its care teams during Timpani Team’s Wave 3 rollout.
Currently, about 7,000 colleagues use the scheduling and staffing platform daily. Timpani is expected to reach over 100 sites by the end of the year with continued expansion to emergency departments. Its success can be traced to HCA Healthcare’s DT&I (formerly Care Transformation and Innovation) team, which produced a customized platform designed with direct input from colleagues. It’s what DT&I calls the clinically-led integration of technology into care.
Involving colleagues to solve a complex challenge
HCA Healthcare believes strongly in hearing directly from our colleagues when it comes to best practices and process improvements. Our nurses communicated that experience and licensure mix should be prioritized when staffing the unit. This, coupled with the reality of an industry-wide staff shortage, led the team to focus on developing Timpani.
While Timpani AVP Product Owner Ben Spears leads product development from Nashville, Tennessee, success needed to start at the front lines with colleagues who would use the technology. So, the Timpani team began the discovery process at
HCA Healthcare Innovation Hubs at UCF Lake Nona Hospital in Orlando, Florida.
“We didn’t start with a bunch of people in Nashville designing this tool for end users,” he says. “We went to colleagues first and asked about their issues and what they wanted from a solution.”
Kalli Lynch, neonatal intensive care unit clinical nurse coordinator at TriStar Hendersonville, was among the first colleagues to use the platform. She says it’s user-friendly and helps her create hassle-free staff schedules. She also frequently uses Timpani Mobile, which lives on the HCA Inspire App. Scheduling changes are easier to adjust because they can be made electronically anytime from anywhere.
“The Inspire app is super easy to use. It’s really nice to be able to see who you’re working with every day,” Kalli says. “It’s also easier to put in your preferences, such as education or time off requests. It also lets you know if extra help is needed, and you can pick up an extra shift.”
While Kalli manages a smaller team of NICU nurses, scheduling challenges increase as the size of a team increases.
“People are our most important resource and, before Timpani, scheduling was very manual and time consuming,” Ben says. “One of our biggest challenges was understanding the details that led to this.”
Timpani’s automated schedule generator takes thousands of inputs such as staff preferences, competencies and scheduling rules, and runs millions of scenarios to create the best schedule possible for the unit. This creates a more equitable balance and ensures the appropriate mix of nurse tenure and licensure.
“Creating a schedule that is perfect for everyone is impossible. But we do our best to meet the needs of the whole department,” says Ben. “We’re creating a better environment and a more equitable scheduling process for everyone.”
The team has already seen great success. For example, when it came to days requested not-to-work, nurse requests were met 98 percent of the time.
Timpani T-Rex roars into scheduling and staffing action for fun care team engagement at Medical City Green Oaks Hospital, part of the Timpani Team’s Wave 2 rollout.
Colleague input drives ongoing improvements
While technology has helped solve the complex challenge of managing multiple inputs to formulate a schedule, Timpani’s continued success requires human connection. Colleague feedback remains vital in identifying gaps.
“We had to figure out what is native — or human — knowledge, that we can then convert into a systematic way for staff or leaders to generate the schedule that they’re looking for,” Ben says.
Colleague feedback even led to the program’s most requested and popular feature: A mobile companion, Timpani Mobile, which lives on the HCA Inspire Mobile app and has logged more than 26,000 downloads as of mid-March.
Looking ahead, Ben and his colleagues are focused on how to enhance Timpani further, including ways to identify outstanding colleagues.
“We believe we can bring further recognition to our most outstanding colleagues by utilizing Timpani’s strengths such as identifying those who are going above and beyond for their unit by picking up additional shifts or assisting partner units through floating opportunities,” Ben says. “All of these are common findings within the scheduling and staffing space that often go unnoticed.”
Embracing change, one schedule at a time
A change in process can sometimes be met with resistance before it’s fully understood. Chesaney Leach, director of Medical Surgical Services at TriStar Hendersonville, has experienced it first-hand.
“As nurses, we’re creatures of habit,” she says. “We don’t like change, but we’re in an ever-changing industry.”
However, when she learned that Timpani could improve scheduling and allow her more time to support nurses and patients, she was immediately enthusiastic.
“My eyes lit up,” she says. “I was so excited.”
Initially, there were questions about the platform and possible machine errors. But Chesaney assured her team that she would be there, reviewing schedules to ensure accuracy. Likewise, Chesaney says the Timpani team were ever-present to seek feedback and address any program glitches.
“We had so many people who were willing to learn the platform. We had a lot of champions who were willing support their co-workers when concerns were voiced,” she says.
As nurses, we’re creatures of habit. We don’t like change, but we’re in an ever-changing industry.— Chesaney Leach, director of Medical Surgical Services, TriStar Hendersonville
They even made the rollout more fun, starting with a Breakfast at Timpani’s-themed event, that invited colleagues to try out the platform at that time. Other facilities incorporated similar events with their kick-offs, such as Tacos and Timpani.
Lenora King, an LPN at Lake Nona Medical Center in Florida, says it took a couple of weeks to adjust to the platform at her facility. Once acclimated, she saw the scheduling program surpass what they had relied on before. If she had to summarize its advantage in a single word, it would be “convenience.”
For Chesaney, the best thing about Timpani is that she now has more time for what initially drew her to nursing.
“I can actually go out and have conversations with my staff and patients and be hands-on with the patients when needed,” she says.
