Increased Profit

Evidence and data. Interviewees’ organizations reported revenue gains from accelerating care team onboarding and optimizing clinical capacity.

Accelerated Care Team Onboarding

Interviewees reported that QGenda reduced their healthcare organizations’ time to onboard new care team members, enabling them to begin delivering care and generate revenue sooner. Before investing in QGenda, interviewees’ institutions faced long credentialing cycles stemming from a lack of visibility into siloed onboarding processes that delayed clinical productivity. As the network director of medical staff services, credentialing, and enrollment for a health system explained, “We were averaging 49 days to credential a provider, and that delay was costing us patients and revenue.” These delays not only impacted revenue and patient access but also strained existing staff. After implementing the QGenda platform, they reduced credentialing time by 19 days, with 10 to 12 days of that improvement attributed to QGenda’s automation and workflow enhancements.

• The network director continued: “Provider onboarding is allowing us to interact and support our hires better through the onboarding application completion process. Improved turnaround times are enabling these practitioners to see patients sooner, which in turn impacts their care. My ultimate goal is to see our turnaround times reduced by 40% to 50% overall, getting us to the 30-day range, which is an achievable goal.” 

• The CIO from the same organization emphasized QGenda’s financial impact and said, “We’re able to onboard providers faster and get them into clinics sooner, which directly impacts our bottom line.” This acceleration in onboarding translated into measurable revenue gains and improved patient access across multiple institutions.

Interviewees noted that QGenda credentialing not only accelerated care team onboarding but also improved the quality and consistency of the credentialing process itself. The network director of medical staff services, credentialing, and enrollment for a health system emphasized that the shift to QGenda brought more than just speed. Their organization saw a reduction in duplicated work, fewer missed steps, and a standardized process across multiple hospitals. This consistency helped ensure that they accurately and reliably completed credentialing, reducing the risk of compliance issues and improving operational confidence. They described the change as a “quality win” for the organization.

• The IT director for a healthcare services provider raised a point about preventing physicians from delivering care before they were officially credentialed. He stated: “We need to ensure that there are no scheduling errors when the end dates and start dates are layered together. This is crucial to avoid scheduling someone seeing patients too soon or in the wrong location.”

Improved Capacity Management

Interviewees reported that using the QGenda platform improved their visibility into care team schedules and room assignments, leading to better exam room utilization and increased clinical throughput. Before adopting QGenda, they faced challenges in tracking room usage, resulting in underutilized capacity and missed revenue opportunities.

• The chief operations officer for a health system noted that their exam room utilization rate before implementing the QGenda platform was only 57%. He explained: “Our target was 67%, which left us with a significant gap in throughput and missed opportunities. The data we had to analyze utilization was retrospective, making it too late to implement improvements. With QGenda, we can proactively anticipate which doctors will be out of the clinic, allowing us to fill those gaps. This capability enables us to make informed strategic and operational decisions that support our doctors and enhance overall throughput. We believe that if we can increase our throughput by 5% each year, we can generate approximately $4.5 million to $5 million in additional revenue annually.” He concluded that over the duration of their contract, this could translate into a gain of $20 million to $25 million.

• After implementing the QGenda platform, the COO for a health system reported an improved exam room occupancy rate of 75% by aligning provider schedules with available space and reducing cancellations. He said, “We can now identify where providers are scheduled and recognize underutilized rooms, enabling us to make real-time adjustments.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• According to NSI Nursing solutions, healthcare organizations experience an average of 8% turnover each year.⁵

• Before deploying QGenda credentialing, it took approximately 60 days to credential a new care team member.

• After deploying QGenda credentialing, the composite organization saves 12 days in Year 1, 21 days in Year 2, and 30 days in Year 3.

• For the composite, the average revenue generated per physician per day is $2,640.

• The composite organization deploys the QGenda platform over three years. The conservative rollout of the platform is 45% complete in Year 1, 75% complete in Year 2, and 100% complete by Year 3.

• The composite organization has 3,400 exam rooms.

• Before deploying QGenda’s exam room management feature, the composite’s room utilization rate was 56%.

• After deploying QGenda’s exam room management feature, the composite’s room utilization rate improves to 61% in Year 1, 63% in Year 2, and 66% in Year 3.

• The revenue per exam room appointment is $165, with an average of 16 appointments per room at 100% utilization.

• According to Kaufman Hall, the average operating margin for hospitals in 2024 was 2%.⁶

Risks. Increased profit numbers will vary depending on:

• The size and type of the health system.

• The type of care provided and corresponding reimbursement rates.

• The number of physicians being credentialed each year.

• The speed of the deployment of the QGenda platform.

• The number of exam rooms in the health system.

• The occupancy room rates of the health system.

• The operating margin of the health system.

• Productivity numbers may be understated because the model only factored in the number of physicians being credentialed and does not include advanced practitioners such as nurse practitioners or physician assistants.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $7.0 million.

Cost Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees’ organizations identified two categories of cost savings, including retiring legacy technologies and reducing premium labor costs.

Technology Cost Savings

Before implementing QGenda, interviewees’ organizations either managed scheduling using manual processes or used legacy scheduling and payroll tools that didn’t fully meet their needs. For example, one interviewee reported that before QGenda, their organization’s scheduling was decentralized across 50 units that each used their own tools and processes, resulting in inefficiencies, errors, and limited visibility into workforce deployment.

By consolidating scheduling and payroll functions into QGenda’s integrated platform, interviewees’ organizations were able to eliminate multiple legacy contracts and reduce administrative overhead needed to maintain these systems. One organization discontinued contracts worth more than $630,000 annually by retiring its legacy payroll and scheduling tools.

In addition to cost savings, QGenda freed up administrative staff to focus on higher-value tasks such as faculty support, research coordination, and operational governance.

• The IT director for a healthcare services provider said, “We were using [legacy payroll and legacy scheduling tools] costing us over $600,000 a year, and we still had payroll errors and no visibility into locum usage.” He continued, “We consolidated scheduling, payroll, and credentialing into one platform, which eliminated redundant contracts and improved accuracy.” Another health system replaced its legacy credentialing software, saving $180,000 annually.

• The CIO for a health system said: “We had duplicative interfaces with so many vendors. With every one of those, there were upgrades, Day Zero patches, servers to maintain, etc. From a financial standpoint, we’re already paying for an enterprise license with QGenda and appreciate having fewer applications and vendor relationships to maintain. For these reasons, consolidation is important to us where it makes sense.”

Reduced Premium Labor Spend

Interviewees’ organizations reported that QGenda helped reduce premium labor costs by improving visibility into physician and nurse availability and streamlining coverage planning. Before implementing QGenda, many institutions relied heavily on traveling nurses and locum tenens care team members to fill scheduling gaps caused by the inability to forecast workforce needs and staffing shortages accurately. The IT director for a healthcare services provider said: “We had no centralized view of our contingent workforce. We were overspending on locums and still missing coverage.” These gaps not only increased labor costs but also introduced operational risk and inefficiencies.

After adopting QGenda, interviewees gained real-time insight into care team schedules and availability, enabling them to optimize the use of their internal staff and reduce their dependency on premium labor.

• The IT director for a healthcare services provider said: “We’ve run AI pilots to optimize the schedule based on the number of providers employed. We’ve used different preference algorithms to shift some days and coverage away from my locums to my W-2s. I want all my W-2s to be working because I’m spending $1,000 on a locum and $500 on the W-2. We’ve reduced our clinical opex through intelligent scheduling and schedule optimization, shifting our costs from contingent workers to locum workers.” 

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• After deploying the QGenda platform, the composite organization retires its legacy scheduling software, saving $450,000 annually.

• After deploying the QGenda platform, the composite retires its legacy time and attendance solutions, saving $150,000 annually.

• Three percent of the composite’s nursing staff are travelers.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for a travel nurse is $94 and $56 for a full-time health system employee.

• After deploying the QGenda platform, the composite organization reduces its travel nurses by 40% in Year 1, 45% in Year 2, and 50% in Year 3.

Risks. Cost savings will vary depending on:

• The size, type, and geographic location of the health system.

• The cost of the legacy software for scheduling, payroll, and time keeping.

• The type of care being provided and corresponding reimbursement rates.

• The number of travel nurses the health system employs.

• Productivity numbers may be understated because the model only factored in the reduction of traveling nurses in the ER, not other areas of the health system.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $22.3 million.

Increased Care Team Member Productivity

Evidence and data. According to Forrester’s Healthcare Practitioners Survey, 2024, 48% of healthcare practitioners reported that having too many administrative burdens is the top challenge they face with patient engagement.⁷ Before investing in QGenda, physicians, nurses, and clinical staff spent hours managing their own schedules, resolving payroll discrepancies, and navigating on-call assignments. “Our doctors were constantly emailing schedulers or checking spreadsheets to see where they were supposed to be,” said the director of compensation, compliance, and analytics for a health system. They added, “It was inefficient and frustrating.”

After investing in the QGenda platform, clinical care team members gained back time previously spent on non-value-adding administrative tasks, allowing for more patient-facing care and increased throughput. Care team members and staff had centralized access to schedules, payroll, and on-call assignments. “We standardized expectations across OB-GYN subspecialties and gave clinicians tools to manage their time,” the director of compensation, compliance, and analytics for a health system explained. They continued, “That built trust and freed up time for patient care.” The COO for a different health system added, “We’ve seen a measurable increase in throughput because providers aren’t wasting time figuring out logistics.”

• The director of medical informatics for a health system said: “QGenda nicely integrates providers’ schedules into one place where they see their clinic schedule and their inpatient schedule. It’s easily synced with their [personal] calendars, and they can easily make switches with their colleagues themselves without having to involve a middleman.”

• The assistant nurse manager for a health system said: “Our staff love using the app on their phones. The list of open and available shifts is immediately available to everybody, and many people can simultaneously make changes.”  

• The chief medical information officer for a children’s hospital said: “Value comes from freeing your clinicians from the scheduling process and getting them into exam rooms where they can see patients. The whole idea is to keep your doctors practicing at the top of their licenses, seeing patients.” Discussing their use of on-call management he continued: “In a large health system, there is more than one on-call provider for a given division. Knowing which provider to contact saves time and being able to reach them directly from your mobile device without switching platforms is a significant time-saver. The integration between scheduling and on call is beneficial because if the call schedule changes, it occurs in real time, ensuring that when the clock turns 5:00, the on-call schedule changes instantly.”

• The director of medical informatics for a health system said: “In the emergency department, we’ve seen a range of productivity from 1.2 to 2.5 patients per hour depending on the provider and shift. With QGenda, we’re able to better match providers to the right shifts and track that performance over time. It’s helped us identify where we can improve throughput and balance workloads more effectively.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• It employs 4,000 physicians and 10,000 nurses and clinical staff.

• The composite organization deploys the QGenda platform over three years. The conservative rollout of the platform is 45% complete in Year 1, 75% complete in Year 2, and 100% complete by Year 3.

• Before QGenda, physicians spent 1 hour per month resolving schedule and payroll issues.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for physicians is $235.

• After deploying the QGenda platform, physicians saw a 50% reduction in time spent doing administrative tasks in Year 1, a 55% reduction in Year 2, and a 60% reduction in Year 3.

• Before QGenda, nurses and clinical staff spent 2 hours per month resolving schedule and payroll issues.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for nurses and clinical staff is $56.

• After deploying the QGenda platform, nurses and clinical staff saw a 50% reduction in time spent doing administrative tasks in Year 1, a 55% reduction in Year 2, and a 60% reduction in Year 3.

• A 50% productivity recapture is applied since not all hours saved are redeployed productively.

Risks. Increased care team member productivity will vary by:

• The number of physicians, nurses, and clinical staff employed by the health system.

• The average hourly rates for physicians, nurses, and clinical staff.

• The rate at which an organization deploys the QGenda platform and its adoption by care team members.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $9.8 million.

Increased Administrative Productivity

Evidence and data. Before implementing the QGenda platform, interviewees described the complexity involved in scheduling staff across their healthcare systems. Department administrators spent hours each week manually reconciling and coordinating coverage across different systems, often relying on spreadsheets and emails to resolve conflicts. Nurse managers dedicated large portions of their days to managing staff schedules instead of providing clinical oversight. 

After adopting QGenda, interviewees reported significant time and cost savings for their organizations. Scheduling leads in clinical divisions saw their scheduling responsibilities drop to just 10% of their time, and the chief medical information officer for a children’s hospital stated: “The QGenda leads in each division spend maybe 10% of their time on scheduling now. It used to be much more.” Rules-based automation and centralized tools streamlined scheduling. “We built hundreds of rules into QGenda,” the chief medical information officer continued. “Now our nurse managers spend only 10% of their time on scheduling instead of 50%.”

• The director of compensation, compliance, and analytics for a health system said: “The administrative team who worked on scheduling also supports our faculty directly. We ask a lot of our faculty: teaching, research, and clinical care. The less time that they’re spending tinkering with schedules, the more time they can spend supporting the faculty. Admins now have time to support publication submissions, organize travel to conferences, organize collaboration with other faculties, support research, or help to finalize or proofread grant applications.”

• An assistant nurse manager for a health system shared, “The charge nurse saves 1 to 1.5 hours a day, and the nurse manager saves about an hour.” They also noted, “We were able to eliminate a full-time scheduler role thanks to QGenda.”

Payroll operations experienced similar transformations. Before QGenda, large teams managed payroll for thousands of care team members, often resulting in high error rates and manual reconciliation. The IT director at a healthcare services provider explained: “We used to have 10 people doing payroll. Now it’s five, and we’re managing 5,000 providers.” The same leader emphasized the impact of automation, saying, “We’ve automated so much that just a few people can run payroll for the whole organization.” They also highlighted the accuracy gains: “Our error rate is down to 0.02%. That’s less time spent fixing mistakes.”

QGenda’s clinical capacity management and credentialing capabilities delivered meaningful administrative efficiencies across multiple interviewees’ healthcare organizations. Administrative teams gained access to automated, real-time data on exam room usage, enabling faster and more informed decisions about clinical capacity planning. This eliminated hours of manual work and allowed staff to manage space and reduce scheduling gaps proactively. Similarly, administrative teams benefited from streamlined credentialing workflows. Before QGenda, credentialing teams faced long turnaround times and inconsistent processes, which required substantial administrative effort to track and monitor. By reducing credentialing time by 10 to 12 days per care team member, administrative teams freed up time and resources for other strategic tasks.

By automating scheduling and clinical capacity room management, streamlining payroll, and accelerating credentialing, interviewees’ organizations were able to reallocate staff time, reduce overhead, and improve operational agility. These examples demonstrate how QGenda’s platform delivers tangible administrative efficiencies.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite employs 68 administrative schedulers.

• Five hundred nurse managers perform administrative work.

• Before deploying the QGenda platform, administrators spent 40 hours creating schedules on a weekly basis.

• The composite organization deploys the QGenda platform over three years. The conservative rollout of the platform is 45% complete in Year 1, 75% complete in Year 2, and 100% complete by Year 3.

• Before QGenda, nurse managers spend 5 hours per week checking schedules and 2 hours per week checking payroll.

• After deploying the QGenda platform, administrators and nurse managers experience a 70% improvement in time spent performing administrative work related to scheduling and payroll, a 75% improvement in Year 2, and an 80% improvement in Year 3.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for an administrator is $70.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for a nurse manager is $42.

• A 50% productivity recapture is applied since not all hours saved are redeployed productively.

• Before QGenda, the composite organization employes 48 full-time payroll administrators.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for a payroll administrator is $70,000.

• After deploying the QGenda platform, the composite redeploys 40% of the payroll administrators to more valuable work in Year 1, 45% in Year 2, and 50% in Year 3.

Risks. Increased administrative productivity will vary by:

• The number of administrative employees and nurse managers.

• The rate at which an organization deploys the QGenda platform and its adoption by administrators and nurse managers.  

• The average hourly rates for administrative employees and nurse managers.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $17.9 million.

Reduced Risk

Evidence and data. Interviewees consistently emphasized that the QGenda platform’s centralized on-call management and real-time care team member visibility helped their institutions reduce legal and compliance risks tied to coverage gaps, miscommunication, and patient safety failures. Before investing in QGenda, on-call scheduling was decentralized and lacked transparency, making it difficult for administrators to confirm who was responsible for coverage at any given time. This ambiguity in identifying and contacting assigned on-call resources created operational and legal exposure, especially in high-acuity settings.

After implementing the QGenda platform, interviewees’ organizations gained unified views of on-call assignments, enabling faster response times, explicit accountability, and improved patient safety. The director of medical informatics noted that without a centralized system, they had no reliable way to confirm who was on call, which posed serious liability risks if the wrong physician was contacted or unavailable during a critical event.

The director of medical informatics for a health system described the scenario before QGenda and the risks it posed: “I had to dig up the phone number for [the on-call resource], I had to ask the secretary for the physician’s number from their secret list, or I had to ask around or text my friends to ask who was supposed to be on call, which could result in a delay in care. Now, there’s just one place to look, which is linked directly within [our electronic health records (EHRs)]. Not only has on-call management increased efficiency by getting the message to the right person faster but it has also decreased frustration and annoyance. It reduces wrong calls. If the physician who was supposed to be on call wasn’t available, it could be a legal issue if a delay in care resulted in patient harm. With QGenda, when you use the texting or paging feature, there’s a log for what you did when you reached out and whether or not the message was received, which, from a legal perspective, is good.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• According to the American Medical Association, health systems pay an average of $22 million in legal fees annually.⁸

• The composite avoids 70% of lawsuits with improved communications.

• A 5% credit is attributed to QGenda’s platform for its role in improving communication.

Risks. Reduced risk will vary by the number of lawsuits brought against the health system.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.5 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Improved workforce satisfaction leads to increased retention. The chief medical information officer for a children’s hospital said: “Having a call schedule that is viewable by all of our hospital’s providers, as well as secure links for the other hospitals where we work, enables people who are looking for help to call the right person the first time. Who is the wrong person? The wrong person is the shift worker at home, trying to sleep before their next shift. The wrong person is someone who is covering a different hospital or a different unit. By not contacting the wrong people, you save them a lot of aggravation, which can lead to job dissatisfaction, reduced engagement, and potential provider turnover. Doctors are happier when they’re not getting called on their time off, and having an accurate schedule ensures this.” QGenda also contributes to increased workforce satisfaction by enabling the creation of fair and equitable schedules that support work-life balance, reducing payroll errors that cause frustration, and providing flexible, self-service tools that give clinical staff greater autonomy and control.

• Enhanced operational excellence with a single, unified platform. Having a single, unified platform from QGenda enabled interviewees’ health systems to unlock the opportunities that came with workforce data visibility. When they scheduled, credentialed, managed capacity, and analyzed their workforces in separate systems, they created data silos that led to missed opportunities for operational improvements. A unified platform simplified their organizations’ workflows, improved the employee experience, and reduced IT complexity. The CIO for a health system discussed why their organization is moving to a single platform for scheduling across his entire clinical staff. He said: “Today, we have our nurse scheduling in [our legacy scheduling tool], but our provider scheduling is in QGenda. The clinical needs require that I have resources like physicians, nurses, and techs to potentially come together around a service, and they’re not in a single platform today. How do you coordinate that when you don’t have visibility across all of them? That’s why we are betting on QGenda.”

• Improved governance and standardization. According to the director of compensation, compliance, and analytics for a health system, implementing the QGenda platform’s advanced scheduling system “forces the leaders and the people that are on the frontlines of deploying people and tracking schedules to articulate what their business model is or to articulate what their business rules are.” He said that although sometimes uncomfortable, this process compelled departments to document and standardize expectations between management and physicians.

• Integrated rollout drives adoption and accelerates time to value. The IT director for a healthcare services provider said, “In hindsight, rolling out QGenda’s scheduling, time tracking, and payroll solutions together would have been a game changer.” He reflected: “Adoption in healthcare is notoriously slow, and introducing new systems piecemeal only compounds the challenge. By launching all three core components simultaneously, we could drive stronger engagement, streamline workflows, and avoid the costly and difficult process of retraining staff years later. The missed opportunity to include features like the swap market during the initial rollout underscores the value of a comprehensive deployment strategy. When adoption is critical and change is hard, doing it right the first time can make all the difference.”

• A trusted team behind the platform. Interviewees consistently praised QGenda for its customer service and responsiveness. Leaders described the company not just as a vendor, but as a true partner committed to their success. The chief medical information officer for a children’s hospital said: “I have found the QGenda people to be delightful to work with, and I don’t say that lightly. I have never felt like they were trying to nickel and dime us to death. Their company culture is one of their biggest assets, and they’ve done everything possible to honor their promises and commitments.” Other interviewees echoed the sentiment, complimenting the reliability of QGenda’s support and willingness to collaborate in adapting to the changing needs of healthcare.

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement the QGenda platform and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Strategic space planning to enable real estate savings. Interviewees asserted that improved visibility into care team member schedules and room utilization enabled strategic space planning across their facilities. The QGenda platform provided real-time data on occupancy rates, cancellations, and care team member availability, allowing interviewees to identify inefficiencies and reallocate space more effectively. One interviewee described how their organization used the QGenda platform to uncover gaps in room usage by department and day of the week, which informed decisions to shift space between clinical units or explore expansion needs. Over time, this level of insight could help organizations avoid unnecessary real estate investments by maximizing the use of existing facilities, closing or consolidating underperforming locations, reducing the need for leased space, and deferring capital expenditures.

• Adaptability to complex healthcare environments. Healthcare operations are dynamic and often unpredictable. Interviewees agreed that QGenda’s workforce management platform adapted to the complex requirements of the healthcare workforce across departments, specialties, and care settings. The platform integrates with EHRs, payroll systems, and HR processes, supporting real-time data flow and reducing administrative burdens. QGenda’s technology, along with its team, works closely with clients to customize rules, workflows, and permissions that reflect their unique operational needs. The assistant nurse manager for a health system described how QGenda supported complex shift structures and staggered start times: “In pre-op, we don’t fit into a typical day, evening, or night nurse schedule that only does eights and twelves. QGenda has been so helpful for us compared to [our legacy tool]. We customized the tool to fit, for example, our different shift lengths.” The IT director for a healthcare services provider described how their payroll department adapted QGenda to handle the contingent workforce: “Twenty-three percent of our total provider population is a contingent workforce. Paying them is not governed by the payroll department but rather by the accounts payable (AP) department because it’s a completely different workflow. We worked with QGenda to customize features within the system to generate invoices and/or time cards for these independent contractors, which were once done on paper and took AP 100 years to complete. Now we do all of that inside of QGenda.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).