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Scheduling hospitalists to maintain a well-staffed hospital is essential, but not easy. A number of features of the physician scheduling program have emerged in the ongoing efforts to maintain patient care and maintain a work-life balance for physicians.
Here are the top ten features of a hospitalist scheduling program.
1) Easy to use interface
Any emergency medical scheduling program you invest in should be easy to use. Difficult interfaces can make it difficult to create and distribute schedules, defeating the goal of investing in such scheduling programs.
2) Flexible schedules with different day types
This feature can be adapted to a wide variety of schedules. This ensures that the program includes a flexible schedule of 1 month, several weeks, or 1-15 weeks. It also allows you to use shift abbreviations for easier viewing, defines hospital shifts (e.g., day, night, swing, call, weekend), and specifies which days should be considered weekends.
With this feature, the physician can change shifts on a slow day to coincide with a busy day.
3) Shift relationships and shift classifications
This physician scheduler feature creates different models for shift relationships, keeps track of shifts between same-day or consecutive shifts, and records desired shifts, shift order, shift types, and more. You can also automate the shift relationship to avoid consecutive shifts.
4) Sharing of information, documents, and messages
Hospitalists will be notified of changes in current and future schedules. With this emergency medicine scheduling feature, important notifications such as memos, reminders, and documents can be published for the hospitalists to see. Calendars can also be synchronized across platforms so they can be accessed by hospital staff in multiple departments.
5) Mobile Access
This is an important feature of shift scheduling programs. Hospitalists can access the software from anywhere and also receive updates on schedule changes and notifications on their mobile devices.
6) Requests for shift on/off and future time off
Another important feature is that hospitalists can view available shifts, view requesters, and submit future shift requests. Instead of manually requesting shifts and time-off, you can do so online through this physician scheduler feature.
7) Up-to-date live online and mobile schedules
Physicians will have online and mobile access to their personalized schedule 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and maintain an accurate and up-to-date live schedule. They will also receive schedule or shift reminders via email or SMS, as well as automatic notification of published schedules.
8) Ability to swap-meet and shift change proposals
Swap-meet, split, trade, give away shifts in your scheduling program will further streamline operational efforts. Depending on the scheduling program, you can even perform all the functions online with native mobile applications.
9) Multi-location schedules
You can manage time-off requests in all locations simultaneously with a coordinated schedule and view employee availability in each location to find out where you need more or less coverage and avoid scheduling conflicts when hospitalists are cross-scheduled.
10) 24/7 Access
Whatever scheduling program your hospital uses, the hospitalists should be able to access it at any time of the day from anywhere.
Take your hospital to a new level by investing in quality physician scheduling software. With that, you will enjoy all of the above features and more.
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