Physician shift scheduling prepared manually using a shared online spreadsheet or paper has been a normal practice in the healthcare industry for quite some time. A traditional manually-created schedule can lead to mistakes, resulting in confusion and last minute hustle to cover a shift.
Many medical facilities and hospitals today are ditching the spreadsheets, calendars, and sticky notes to opt for the more efficient and modern medical scheduling software.
There's a lot of variability in healthcare operation shifts, including:
- Day
- Night
- Weekends
- Holidays
- Vacations
- Teaching
- Non-teaching
And, not all physicians can take on all shifts required. Hospital scheduling software can help devise the rules and weight them by priority.
The goal of scheduling is to match up healthcare resources, such as
- physicians
- nurses
- healthcare technicians
- healthcare assistants
- medicine
- equipment
- rooms
with the needs of the patients. When you have an organized emergency medicine scheduling system, you reduce patient wait times and improve how critical (and sometimes limited) resources are used. Medical scheduling software tracks resource availability, projects future demand for services, and automates assigning resources to patient needs. It also enables your staff and you to access the schedule via the web through computers, tablets, and mobile devices.
You can feed your projected patient demand and physician supply into the program or things like needing more appointments for busy times, such as the flu season. The software has intelligence that it uses to weigh in these types of factors to determine an optimal schedule and build it.
If you're still manually creating your on-call schedules by combining phone calls, emails, voicemails, and faxes into a spreadsheet or word document, you understand how much time, money, and resources you're wasting. Make your medical on-call scheduling process easier by implementing physician scheduling software. Ensure staff efficiency and schedule accuracy by sharing the schedule in real-time online.
Benefits of Medical Scheduling Software Some benefits of web-based medical scheduling software include:
- View schedule information online in real-time.
- Access on-call schedules through your smartphone, computer or tablet.
- Notify staff of schedule changes instantly.
- Control user permissions on multiple levels.
- Generate facility-wide schedules in advance for up to one year for employees.
- Track user profile and on-call scheduling changes.
- Generate reports that allow your accounting team to immediately know the total hours and shifts each doctor works.
- Save on-call schedules for physicians indefinitely for EMTALA compliance.
While you will need to learn how to use the new medical scheduling software and may feel intimidated by it, it takes very little time to learn the system and begin using it. Plus, you can request a medical scheduling software demo.
Once you have it set up, your healthcare facility will benefit immensely by eliminating the time-consuming process of manual scheduling and making the switch to shift scheduling software.
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