The emergency room (ER) is a challenging place for doctors to work. They can often be stressful workplaces. When it comes to physician scheduling, out of all groups of doctors, scheduling ER doctors is more complex. Many ER physicians work full-time, while other doctors in other specialties only work a few times a week or month in the hospital and then spend the rest of their time in their own office taking care of their patients.
The emergency room is open seven days a week, 24 hours a day, requiring doctors to work various shifts — mornings, evenings and weekends. ER physicians are also "on call" which means they still need to be available for these shifts but only spend a small amount of time in the ER.
If you're in charge of emergency room scheduling, you need to weigh out both quality and quantity. You need to schedule the right physicians at the right time to ensure all patients are taken care of properly and that you have enough physicians and other staff scheduled at all times.
Maintaining the shift scheduling system manually drains both manpower and time the ER can't afford. Taking this into consideration, many scheduling administrators are now turning to emergency medicine scheduling software to automate the process.
Some benefits of automated schedule software for your ER include: - Automated Schedule Creation
- This technology can be configured to meet the individualized rules of your group, including:
- Scheduling targets
- Specialization needs
- Staff availability
- Scheduling priorities
- Assignment restrictions and correlations
Shift scheduling software takes all these rules into account auto-populating an error-free schedule. You'll have access to advanced reports and tools to ensure schedule fairness before you publish the schedule. This technology makes the scheduling process fair, fast and efficient.
Reporting and Tracking
Along with hour, point and call tracking, you have many other reports accessible to you within emergency room scheduling software. Also, all group members have visibility of the summarized schedule to realize the fairness of the schedule.
Saving Time
Creating the ER schedule is often a tedious process. With hundreds of options and dozens of considerations, it can easily take hours to complete this task. When using physician scheduling software, it eliminates all this tedious work, freeing you to focus on fairness and important decisions.
Last Minute Changes
Scheduling software was created for the medical setting which makes it the perfect tool to quickly respond to unforeseen and frequent changes. The technology uses email, text messages and the Internet to make a clear channel of communication, ensuring schedule changes are not only quickly resolved, but are adequate and fair.
Consider Physician's Needs
Emergency medicine scheduling software allows you to easily consider doctors' scheduling preferences and needs. You can schedule demanding shifts across all doctors equally. Doctors frequently work long, irregular shifts which does a number on their interactions with family and friends and on their social lives.
By using automated scheduling software, it provides doctors with the convenience of knowing exactly when they're working. And, since the schedules are updated in real-time and available online 24 hours a day, it reduces physician frustration, resulting in better performance, increased productivity and improved staff retention.
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