Columbia Basin Health Association improves workflow efficiency to better serve patients

Columbia Basin Health Association (CBHA) has three state-of-the-art, multi-specialty clinics in central Washington, providing more than 40 thousand patients with comprehensive outpatient services. “In a rural community, it’s important that people have one healthcare facility to reach easily, wherever they’re at,” explains Courtney Martinez, Operations Analyst at CBHA.

Orchestrating change

Until recently, the company used tools such as Microsoft Excel, Visio and Outlook to manually coordinate tasks and processes. This changed in 2018 when CBHA purchased the first Smartsheet licences to automate workflows across the entire business and streamline cross-departmental project work.

Getting buy-in for the new, cloud-based platform initially posed a challenge. “People were not used to having cloud assets—something intangible that you couldn’t store and access on a hard drive,” says Martinez. So her team started small, making marketing request forms with Smartsheet and demonstrating how it could solve issues through automation. 

“Eventually, people got into Smartsheet and realised: ‘Wow, I can save time in meetings, work from home, collaborate with someone in another state, and make document updates on the fly without back-and-forth emails - gaining time to devote to meaningful tasks thanks to Smartsheet was a game changer,” she says.

Staying informed about employees’ health

During the COVID-19 pandemic, HR specialists could easily monitor all 450 healthcare employees’ vaccination status with Smartsheet. “To meet regulatory requirements, we must demonstrate that all 450 healthcare workers follow state vaccine guidelines—Smartsheet made the task easy,” explains Rebecca Wolfs, Director of Training, Development and Compliance at CBHA. 

Using the same pattern, CBHA has also automated sick leave management with Smartsheet. “When an employee calls in, an HR team member puts the recording into the form and fills out any required information in a predefined template. Supervisors are then automatically notified,” explains Wolfs.

Offloading repetitive HR tasks

The onboarding process by the HR department is also much quicker now with Smartsheet. “When a new person joins, Smartsheet automates notifications to all the various system administrators to set-up logins for the new employee that they will need on day one” says Wolfs. “We also created an onboarding tracker for managers to easily see where their new hires are in the hiring status—documents signed, background check completed, start date confirmed, and so on.” 

Building on Smartsheet’s flexibility, the HR team constantly adds new workflows to improve processes. “For instance, our intranet site has links to various Smartsheet forms, such as marketing request forms, CE reimbursement forms, and volunteer sign-ups (to name a few). All we need to do is click the link and fill out a Smartsheet form—it’s so simple!” says Wolfs. 

Tracking and storing auditable records

With Smartsheet, CBHA is also assured that its operations are compliant with federal and state regulations. “We require audits to get federal grant funding every year—it’s quite extensive as there are 19 measures we must comply with and a 50-page manual to follow,” explains Wolfs. 

Her team used Smartsheet in the last audit, which ensured accurate and complete documentation.

“We only had to bring up a Smartsheet with the required documents and provide auditors with a link to retrieve them. It was so simple and effective,” she says. “We’re also experimenting now with Smartsheet’s proofing capability by cross-checking documents for our next audit with the past audit’s documents to see what things are still applicable. It’s made audit preparations much quicker to complete.”

Gleaning cross-team data in a single view

Reporting is also streamlined at CBHA now thanks to Smartsheet. Previously, employees would type reports in a word document and email them to supervisors, but this would result in an overwhelming number of pages for the CEO to read. “To make reports more meaningful, I now extract essential information from submitted documents and put it into one sheet. I also automate the output with reminders, graphs, and a dashboard,” explains Martinez.
WorkApps also gives everyone quick and easy access to the reports they need on their smartphones. “One of the managers thanked me recently, saying WorkApps make it much easier for her to keep up with work. She can check where her team is at any time through a mobile app and remembers to submit a monthly report thanks to automated reminders.”

Making time and space to grow

One of the most significant benefits of moving to Smartsheet for CBHA was time savings. “Losing time affects everybody, and Smartsheet saves us time by making tasks so effortless,” explains Martinez. 

Thanks to automation, the HR team gains 10 to 20 hours a month to spend on more valuable, people-facing tasks. For example, it has saved time on updating supervisor scorecards that provide data on CBHA employees. “It would take our HR director sometimes a week to pull, verify, and calculate data about turnover, holidays, absenteeism, etc., and send it to all supervisors,” Wolfs says. “With Smartsheet, we have automated most of these activities, turning a week’s process into three or four hours.” 

Encouraged by these results, CBHA is seeking more ways to grow with Smartsheet. “We have about 450 employees, serving around 40,000 patients a year between three sites. So we’re constantly growing and continue to find ways to leverage Smartsheet,” says Wolfs, “I can’t even imagine what we would do without it right now.”