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The goal of creating an effective emergency medicine scheduling system is ensuring your doctors' shifts are as organized and productive as possible. This allows them to maintain focus on quality patient care. These 10 tips will help you simplify the schedule creation process without sacrificing on efficiency.
1. Know Your Doctors' Preferences
A huge factor in physician scheduling is knowing your physicians' preferences. For instance, one doctor wants every other weekend off to be home with their family or two doctors are married and prefer to work the same shifts or work separate shifts. Knowing information like this can help balance out the schedule fairly.
2. Plan on Work-Ins
Having a booked schedule can look promising. But, if all your practice resources are committed, you're not leaving any slack for responding to the unexpected. It's a good idea to leave a couple "work-in" slots open in the schedule that you can utilize if needed.
3. Build in Lead Times
When your doctors know the lead times related to various types of appointments it enables them to interpret the real appointment time correctly.
4. Understand the Rules
You might require different rules for different circumstances, such as patient demand and physician supply during busy times, like during flu season.
5. Keep the Posting of the Schedule Consistent
Come to an agreement of when the finalized schedule will be published. This will help create consistency that will help doctors create an ideal work-life balance.
6. Monitor the Numbers
When you know the patient census, such as when your department is slowest, busiest or over capacity, it helps with generating a fair schedule.
7. Figure Out the Optimal Time for Posting the Schedule
Doctors' time is extremely valuable to them. Not only should you be consistent when you post the schedule, but the best time to post it should be agreed on. Not all groups will be unanimous on all things, so it's important you find the time to have a meeting about this so you can come to a unanimous decision of when to post the schedule.
8. Come up with a method to track work totals and shifts to ensure your schedule is distributed well to avoid conflicts before they occur.
If there's a disagreement, tracking will help you resolve it effectively which is a feature shift scheduling software offers.
9. Balance Last-Minute Requests for Vacations
Many doctors will want to spend the holidays with their families, so vacation requests will likely pour in throughout the year. However, you will find those last-minute requests pop in. It takes a delicate balance to sort through these last-minute requests and allow each doctor a much-needed break, while still providing patients with the best care possible.
10. Proofread and Revise Your Schedule
Double check your schedule to identify and eliminate any errors. Scheduling software can help with this. You want to ensure the schedule is as accurate as possible before you publish it to avoid any last-minute changes or errors.
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