How to Develop a Medical Staff Scheduling System

Optimally distributing your staff’s work time is an important factor for your clinic’s success. But the problem is that you’re probably spending more hours optimizing your schedules than you care to admit. Indeed, medical staff scheduling is time-consuming and chaotic. Managing piles of calendars, spreadsheets, timetables, and time off requests, assigning employees to shifts at one or multiple locations, and keeping up with constantly changing schedules all take a big bite out of an administrator’s time and cause headaches.

Employee scheduling shouldn’t be that complicated. And there is a way out! — medical staff scheduling software. Scheduling software allows clinics to reduce the time spent creating work schedules, cuts costs on overtime shifts, and offers care providers a seamless experience.

SOURCE: WISETAIL.COM

Employee scheduling softwareis a big step for your clinic. Should you go with an off-the-shelf solution orcreate a scheduling appfrom scratch? What features are important inhospital scheduling software?And what benefits does this type of technology bring to your healthcare business? These are the most crucial questions to answer before you start to use a scheduling system. We’re here to help you answer them. But before we go deep into must-have features and the off-the-shelf solutions versus custom development debate, we’ll take a moment to understand whathealthcare staff schedulingissues managers regularly encounter.

Common employee scheduling problems in healthcare

Research into shift scheduling challenges by TSheets shows that more than half of employees spend at least two hours each week building the shift schedule. Meanwhile, 8% of employees say they spend four hours on this each week and 9% spend five hours. Some employees say they’ve spent up to 12 hours a week designing schedules. Why is scheduling so time-consuming? Health services managers are spending a lot of time building schedules because they face quite a lot of staffing challenges. Let’s get a bigger picture of what some of these challenges are.

Sudden changes

With spreadsheets, your employees need to call a manager every time they want to make changes to their work schedules, and the manager needs to make these changes by hand. This is not an easy or fast task. Plus, it often leads to errors.

No anywhere, anytime schedule access

It’s quite a challenge for medical staff to access schedules. Staff members have to call a manager whenever they need to pick up a shift or communicate changes. Sometimes, they may even have to come to work on a day off to learn the schedule if calling is not an option.

Inadequate medical staffing

Keeping staffing ratios safe has long been an uphill fight in the healthcare sector. Often, there aren’t enough nurses, physicians, and other healthcare providers to fill shifts. Staffing imbalances can lead to many negative outcomes including medication errors, patient dissatisfaction, and staff burnout.

Problems of accountability and visibility

When managing schedules manually, you can’t have total control over what’s going on at the moment and full visibility into your staff’s availability. This poses a risk of overlapping shifts and unintended attendance and time violations since employees may not be aware of last-minute changes.

Time off requests go forgotten or overlooked

Emailing time off requests to a manager or writing them down on sticky notes is a formula for those requests being overlooked or forgotten. Not to mention the burden of handling leave and time off requests themselves.

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