The optimal distribution of your staff’s work time plays a crucial role in determining the success of your practice. However, many organizations still spend a large amount of their time to optimize schedules. For organizations that serve walk-in patients like urgent care centers and ERs (emergency rooms), determining demand & volume while aligning them with staff availability at times poses a challenge. Sounds familiar?
A good scheduling system helps reduce the wait time for patients while also improving critical resource utilization. It does help with tracking the availability of doctors/nurses, patient appointment management, projecting the patient demands for service & even automating the resource assignment as the requirement.
With this article, we will take you through the important elements of staff scheduling software with some of the key features that organizations must consider.
As the name suggests it helps manage, optimize and automate the scheduling process of staff across medical facilities like hospitals, private practice, clinics, nurses, front office staff and lab technicians.
Today, scheduling solutions are equipped to offer personalization and flexibility features that help you increase efficiency & improve practice / service performance. They help seamlessly manage routine tasks as per the schedule for the staff, generate timesheets, track overtime, record off days & vacations & sick leaves.
Creating Win-Win Shifts with Automated Scheduling
Automation helps simplify tasks like monitoring overtime, tracking compliance and absenteeism. Also, there is no need for managers and staff to create a shift assignment. This goes on to include other benefits like lower chances of no-shows, reduced overtime & full visibility into team schedules.
Puts Employees at the Heart of Operations
Your goal as an organization is also to support & nurture your staff in a way that helps them stay productive and satisfied. Higher employee engagement is equivalent to higher job satisfaction, higher productivity, higher revenue and increased sales. This is the power of actively engaged employees who are ready to go above and beyond to achieve organizational goals. But how do you measure that? You must give your employees a voice & learn through real-time and continuous feedback. This will help you get to the root of existing problems and re-align processes.
Gets Your Labor Costs Under Control
Healthcare leaders have been scrambling to manage their costs. This often involves a closer look at your staff. However, cost reduction does not necessarily mean layoffs, especially in a new normal that already struggles with a huge nursing shortage. That’s why labor utilization needs to be planned & monitored at a supervisory level to simplify the decision-making process in cases where premium labor is being utilized.
With medical employee scheduling software development, frontline managers are equipped with the information they need to make informed decisions to cut down on premium labor while ensuring that their duties are still performed. It helps with the calculation of overtime rates and real-time employee allocation. These insights help you proactively make decisions and allocate staff for shifts so that you can drastically reduce overtime costs.
Ensure Adherence with Labor Laws
Workforce scheduling is at a critical juncture between operations and regulations that control them. To accommodate changes in regulations with labor laws and collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), healthcare organizations rely upon automated scheduling to better manage the last-minute changes. Also, it’s likely to create challenges for businesses that have manual practices in place. A scheduling software provides integrated compliance capabilities to ensure compliance across the scheduling lifecycle.
Our team of specialists can help you develop custom & integrated solutions that put you in control of operations.
Now that you know about the benefits here a few key features of scheduling software and the impact it can create across your organization.
1. Flexible Scheduling
2. Mobile-First
We know that as healthcare professionals, the teams are always on the go. That’s why a deskless workforce demands software that helps your staff to get more done while they are on their feet. Whether it’s on their smartphone or laptop, real-time communication across teams is critical, so that everyone is in the know of the processes.
3. Manager Visibility
The solution helps reduce managerial efforts. It serves as an extra set of eyes when managers need real-time updates on employee activities. During the Medical staff scheduling software development, the requirement of managerial permission should be taken care of before employees schedule their tasks. It would enable putting together admin tasks to track important updates like late check-in, shift rejection and task completion.
4. Work process Monitoring
Every manager needs to understand how their teams function – no matter where they operate from. But if you have to optimize productivity, they need access to the right data and understand its impact across the organization. This means being equipped with intuitive dashboards and actionable insights that track the productivity of your teams. With the right software in place, you can gain insights on user activity data to analyze what a productive team member looks like and identify areas for improvement.
To help you further understand how healthcare staff scheduling software development can help improve employee communication, here’s a look at some of the issues with their practical solution.
Problem #1
Sending messages to staff takes a very long time.
Solution:
Some bots can automate the process for you & identify staff that is available to take up a shift.
Problem #2
Learning new software is complicated & time-consuming for our staff.
Solution:
A custom scheduling software helps intuitively train untrained user & even support them in understanding more advanced features in a matter of minutes.
Problem #3
Updating staff on a change of schedule is challenging & time-consuming.
Solution:
Multiple comment and communication tools are designed to put out the right message at the right time.
Scheduling is a lifeline for every healthcare facility to operate seamlessly. However, managing spreadsheets, timetables and calendars only adds a layer of complexity to staff scheduling. Automated software is designed to meet your needs, automate your routines & tailor it to your specific clinical processes that ultimately improve your services.
Our highly competent team focused on healthcare software development can help you build custom workforce scheduling software aligned with your business goals. We use advanced technologies and have the know-how of industry regulations to deliver solutions that meet the needs of forward-looking healthcare organizations.
Team Rishabh can help address complexities in healthcare staffing that focuses on productivity and profits across the board.