With the recent changes in the nursing sector, long term care facilities are required to submit census and staffing information in electronic form. This requirement aims at promoting accountability in nursing facilities. The payroll based journal was evolved as an electronic platform to be used in nursing activities. This platform is also used to collect staffing data in standardized format. When working with this platform, the following PBJ requirements should be met.

Nursing institutions should adopt the payroll data submission system to enhance equity in their operations. Consumers use a certain rating system to gauge the services offered by these institutions. For a nursing home to be highly rated, it should have good inspection results and adequate staffing. Concerns have been raised over the credibility of the rating system. This is because there are nursing centers that artificially adjust their ratings to draw more clients.

In order to increase transparency, the new payroll data submission system only handles auditable and verifiable data. This measure seeks to reduce fraudulent reporting as well as fostering a fair competition amongst nursing facilities. The new system is therefore ideal for residents and providers of nursing services.

Another mandatory requirement that should be met is licensing. According to nursing policies, an institution is allowed to offer long term care services to people only when it has acquired a license from the nurses licensing board. Furthermore, the institution should comprise of competent and licensed nurses. The payroll information system only allows staffing data from licensed institutions.

The payroll based journal also mandates nursing homes to prepare staffing data before submission. Facilities should list their contract staff and agencies in the reports. This information can however be tracked in different ways. For instance, most nursing facilities employ temporary staff and this information may not be documented in the system as employees. Nursing institutions are also mandated to be proactive when drafting the reports. On average, a deadline for submitting staffing data is usually set. Failure to meet data submission deadlines can be costly.

Nursing facilities are also mandated to capture and track information from multiple software products. Most institutions however find it hard to adhere to this requirement. Most of them handle employee data in different mechanisms such as payroll scheduling and attendance recording. These institutions are mandated to speak with software vendors and ensure that the software sold is authentic.

It is important to work with software vendors who are trustworthy. As an owner of a nursing institution, you can partner with the vendors to assist you with future staffing data queries. Before partnering with software providers, ask them about the advances they are making in the payroll data submission sector. Assess their products to determine whether they can suit your current workflow.

Experts argue that staffing is a critical component in service delivery as far as nursing activities are concerned. Along these lines, staffing data can also be interpreted to help people in learning about the functional and organizational set up of nursing centers. This data is used to conduct quarterly reviews after it has been collected. Quarterly reviews on the other hand are about the average number of employees who work in a particular nursing facility in a day.