From the time a patient is admitted into the emergency room until they're discharged, the hospitalist provides direct patient consultations, care and preoperative evaluations. The hospitalist’s schedule is a huge debate in the hospital medicine field. As the schedule manager, you're having to create a work schedule that balances the best patient care possible, but at the same time, preserve a reasonable lifestyle for your hospitalists.
Shift-Based Schedules
Hospitalists, like everyone else, require time to pursue other interests and be with their family. With shift-based schedules, your hospitalists can work a pre-assigned set of shifts with no on-call responsibility. However, this still poses a problem with balancing out quality time off for the staff and productivity.
Flexible Schedules
Flexible schedules may vary between practices, but generally, they're created to accommodate the hospitalist group's preferences. While you increase employee satisfaction and retention with flexible shift scheduling, you still need to assure you have proper coverage to maintain quality patient care.
Time Off Requests
Often downtime and vacation requirements of hospitalists conflict with acuity-based staffing or patient census. For instance, you might need to maintain a schedule where your hospitalist is working five to seven days consecutively in order to assure quality patient care. But, this could conflict with the hospitalist's need for rest between shifts or vacation.
Using Hospitalist Scheduling Software to Create an Organized and Fair Schedule
When working with emergency medicine scheduling, schedule administrators often struggle with balancing out the providers' unique preferences and the institutional requirements like the requirement for continuity of patient care.
That’s where scheduling software comes in. It can help create schedules that meet organizational requirements while at the same time honor the individual preferences of the providers.
With physician scheduling software, you can optimize your hospitalist schedule by: * Tracking the number of contracted shifts.
* Distributing on-call shifts fairly.
* Prioritizing what hospitalists are working and when.
* Allowing hospitalists to swap shifts with each other easily.
* Configuring rules that will fit any group size.
You can configure the hospitalist scheduling software to meet the individualized rules of your group, including:
* Scheduling targets
* Staff availability
* Specialization needs
* Assignment restrictions and correlations
* Scheduling priorities
The scheduling software takes all your rules into account to auto-populate a schedule that's free of errors. You'll have access to advanced reports and tools to ensure schedule fairness before you publish it. Scheduling software simply makes the scheduling process efficient, fair and fast.
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