Do you find yourself asking who is on the job this week? Answering this question should not give you a headache. Through automated scheduling, the process can be made as simple as pressing a button and freeing up time from repetitive tasks, permitting you to focus on providing exceptional patient care and service.
Scheduling automation and optimization improve patient experience, staff satisfaction, and workforce efficiency. In today's healthcare climate, planning the workforce is critical to success. Poor workforce planning can lead to missed patient appointments, long patient wait times, and negative community perceptions of your organization.
Importance of Automating Your Medical Staff Scheduling
There are several significant advantages to automating your medical staff scheduling. They include:
1) Optimized Workflow Demand and Supply
A good medical staff scheduling program automates scheduling throughout the hospital and can help centralize it. This ensures that all front-line physician schedulers adhere to the same guidelines. It also expands the view far beyond individual departments to assist staff requests in making sense within the overall workflow. A broader perspective like this cannot function without automation clearly articulates which nurse or doctor needs to be where and when. An automated scheduling program can not only help you to generate various scenarios, but also evaluate them in real-time. It can instantly account for last-minute shift cancellations or nursing coverage added through a short-term agency hire.
Hundreds of schedule permutations can be generated and tested in seconds, revealing real opportunities to optimize staffing while meeting patient care demands. Understanding and implementing workforce scheduling automation in the healthcare industry will teach you how to improve the efficiency of your facility.
2) Win-Win Shifts
Automation aids in the simplification of tasks such as monitoring overtime, tracking compliance, and absenteeism. There is also no need for managers and employees to create a shift assignment. Other advantages include lower no-show rates, reduced overtime, and complete visibility of team schedules.
3) Improved Cost-Effectiveness
Automation in healthcare workforce scheduling software provides a complete picture of workforce needs and patterns. Healthcare providers can use automation to monitor the impact of scheduling options on financial and performance metrics to improve cost-effectiveness. A healthcare facility, for example, can reduce overtime costs by minimizing shift scheduling errors and ensuring that the appropriate staff cover shift schedules. Bed obstructions can be identified early and treated appropriately. Workers who prefer to work standby shifts will also be accommodated to have a more balanced work-life.
4) Compliance With Labor Laws
Workforce scheduling is at a crossroads between operations and the regulations that govern them. Healthcare organizations rely on automated scheduling to better manage last-minute changes in rules with labor laws and collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). Furthermore, it is likely to pose difficulties for businesses that rely on manual processes. To ensure compliance throughout the scheduling lifecycle, scheduling software includes integrated compliance capabilities.
ByteBloc Software has been trusted for more than 30 years, and has been used for healthcare staffing, physician scheduling, emergency medicine scheduling, throughout Canada, the U.S., and other countries. Schedule your demo today to see what all the buzz is about.
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