When the flu season hits, emergency departments all over the country expect an increase in patients with the flu, colds and other viruses. Although there typically isn't anything to worry about, some patients do end up with severe or life-threatening complications. In the United States, influenza viruses occur most often during the fall and winter months. And flu activity can begin as early as October and peaks somewhere between December and February, though it can last until May.
Because of this, it's more important than ever that you have your schedule organized and filled to accommodate the influx of patients. Since 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), flu estimates resulted in between 140,000 and more than 700,000 hospitalizations each year. Get ahead of the scheduling conundrum of the busy emergency room during the cold and flu season with emergency medicine scheduling software.
The ER is one of the medical specialties where physician scheduling is challenging. Doctors get burnt out. There are around the clock staffing requirements. In your schedule, you need to address patient flow fluctuations, physician preferences, staff shortages, overcrowding and more. Scheduling programs help you handle the high stress and pressure of the scheduling process so you can create a schedule that’s accurate and fair.
Shift Scheduling Challenges
Some challenges in creating a schedule for your emergency department include: - It's time-consuming.
- It's outdated or misplaced.
- Coverage problems occur due to time-off requests.
- Physicians need shift changes.
- It's not possible mathematically.
- It's hard to distribute equal work.
ER scheduling programs are designed to allow you to create equitable and fair schedules for your ER team. Emergency doctors can manage switches, requests, holidays and vacations in real-time. Scheduling programs follow your group's customs, rules and policies as it populates a schedule automatically that’s free of errors. They fairly distribute holidays, evenings and weekends. They make it simple to balance individual preferences and staffing requirements.
If you're responsible for the ER shift scheduling, you already know how challenging it can be to create a fair schedule that meets everyone’s' needs. Creating a workable schedule can literally take several hours if not more.
But, you need to have enough nurses, physicians and other healthcare staff to meet your patients' needs. Physician scheduling programs handle doctor scheduling requirements with simple-to-use software. This makes it easy to create an ideal schedule for everyone while always knowing who's scheduled to work and who's on call.
Efficient staff scheduling helps ER departments tremendously. Unfortunately, many scheduling managers overlook them. Manually creating the schedule for your team can cause avoidable costs, shifts with no coverage and unnecessary work. By using this ER scheduling technology, you’re helping your medical organization save money and time while providing high-quality patient care.
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