How A Digital Work Hub Can Reduce Employee Burnout In Your Healthcare Organiz...ChristosSchrader1
Burnout is on the rise among clinicians and other healthcare workers. Prior to the pandemic, nearly 40% of nurses reported they felt burned out because of long work hours, greater workloads, poor environments, and caring for significantly ill patients. In 2021, that figure had jumped all the way to 70%.
With countless contributing factors to burnout (one being the extended trauma of fighting the pandemic for the last few years), there has never been a more important time to prioritize the digital employee experience of your healthcare workforce.
In this whitepaper, we make the case for how a modern digital work hub can reduce burnout in your healthcare organization.
Mastering disaster a data center checklistChris Wick
50% of businesses that experience data loss for 10 days or more file for bankruptcy and 93% fail within a year. But with a Disaster Recovery plan, you don't have to worry visit https://goo.gl/Ba1J9e.
Planning the implementation of an EMR or EHR, then you need to understand the basics of defining your clinical workflow. This presentation was made at a variety of medical conferences
How mining leaders can take charge to improve safety, productivity and reduce...Hendrik Lourens
Variation in mining is – and will always be – more pronounced than in other industries such as automotive and
manufacturing. Because of physical constraints in mining, the actions of any mining department can affect the
work of all others. This creates interdependence, coordination and trust problems, which multiply the negative
impact of variation on throughput.
It is possible to quickly (within 3-5 months) improve output, productivity and safety when we adjust our
thinking and actions to harness and better manage variation. We have seen clients dramatically improve their
productivity (typically more than 20 per cent but substantially bigger increases have been observed) and
become safer work environments by using software and holistic management practices. These make work
visible and change the focus to be forward-looking instead of analysing the past. Execution and planning
become properly integrated and much more effective.
While these practices are innovative from a technical aspect, they succeed because they provide frontline
leaders and workers the opportunity to build a community of trust and coordinate along with a unity of
purpose.
Successful workers and frontline leaders who experience mastery, autonomy and purpose become highly
engaged and deliver even better results. It is easy to lead well in such an environment. Employees, managers
and executives experience lowered levels of stress and find joy in their work environment again. This is what
has been missing in mining for many years.
Executives, after implementing the actions described often comment along the following lines ‘…I am happy
with the improved financial performance in such a short time, but I am even happier with the kind of
organisation we have become. I see teamwork and increased motivation everywhere.’
HFMA Article: 5 Signs That You Can Reduce Staffing Costs and Boost Nurse Sati...Block & Tackle Marketing
See how three Care Logistics hospitals are increasing efficiency in care delivery to improve healthcare quality and nurse morale while reducing costs from overtime, agency use, and turnover. By Care Logistics CFO Samantha Platzke.
How A Digital Work Hub Can Reduce Employee Burnout In Your Healthcare Organiz...ChristosSchrader1
Burnout is on the rise among clinicians and other healthcare workers. Prior to the pandemic, nearly 40% of nurses reported they felt burned out because of long work hours, greater workloads, poor environments, and caring for significantly ill patients. In 2021, that figure had jumped all the way to 70%.
With countless contributing factors to burnout (one being the extended trauma of fighting the pandemic for the last few years), there has never been a more important time to prioritize the digital employee experience of your healthcare workforce.
In this whitepaper, we make the case for how a modern digital work hub can reduce burnout in your healthcare organization.
Mastering disaster a data center checklistChris Wick
50% of businesses that experience data loss for 10 days or more file for bankruptcy and 93% fail within a year. But with a Disaster Recovery plan, you don't have to worry visit https://goo.gl/Ba1J9e.
Planning the implementation of an EMR or EHR, then you need to understand the basics of defining your clinical workflow. This presentation was made at a variety of medical conferences
How mining leaders can take charge to improve safety, productivity and reduce...Hendrik Lourens
Variation in mining is – and will always be – more pronounced than in other industries such as automotive and
manufacturing. Because of physical constraints in mining, the actions of any mining department can affect the
work of all others. This creates interdependence, coordination and trust problems, which multiply the negative
impact of variation on throughput.
It is possible to quickly (within 3-5 months) improve output, productivity and safety when we adjust our
thinking and actions to harness and better manage variation. We have seen clients dramatically improve their
productivity (typically more than 20 per cent but substantially bigger increases have been observed) and
become safer work environments by using software and holistic management practices. These make work
visible and change the focus to be forward-looking instead of analysing the past. Execution and planning
become properly integrated and much more effective.
While these practices are innovative from a technical aspect, they succeed because they provide frontline
leaders and workers the opportunity to build a community of trust and coordinate along with a unity of
purpose.
Successful workers and frontline leaders who experience mastery, autonomy and purpose become highly
engaged and deliver even better results. It is easy to lead well in such an environment. Employees, managers
and executives experience lowered levels of stress and find joy in their work environment again. This is what
has been missing in mining for many years.
Executives, after implementing the actions described often comment along the following lines ‘…I am happy
with the improved financial performance in such a short time, but I am even happier with the kind of
organisation we have become. I see teamwork and increased motivation everywhere.’
HFMA Article: 5 Signs That You Can Reduce Staffing Costs and Boost Nurse Sati...Block & Tackle Marketing
See how three Care Logistics hospitals are increasing efficiency in care delivery to improve healthcare quality and nurse morale while reducing costs from overtime, agency use, and turnover. By Care Logistics CFO Samantha Platzke.
Find ways to prevent Disaster from knocking on your company door! Make sure your plan is in place as we anticipate a weekend storm - sales@telehouse.com
Workplace productivity is an estimate of how efficiently organizations utilize their resources to accomplish business objectives. Improving productivity is important because increasing it can increase revenue using the same or fewer resources.
Dialysis Centers: Automating and optimizing the workforce scheduling of patie...Einstein II
Workforce scheduling of patient care staff that include Registered
Nurses, licensed practical nurses and patient care technicians, who
provide dialysis treatments to patients is critical and complex for dialysis
centres. The recent reforms and regulatory pressures in the industry don’t
seem to help either. These regulatory reforms are forcing dialysis centres
to revisit their margins and costs in an unprecedented manner.
The NHS Bermuda Triangle by Marc Baker, Ian Taylor and Daniel T JonesLean Enterprise Academy
We've been applying Lean Thinking in healthcare for the past five years, Over that time we have discovered two things:
First, the good news. Lean works in healthcare. The Bad news: Lean will never take toon in the NHS as it stands: it is management that needs to change.
A presentation given by international keynote speaker Dr. Stephen Muething from Cincinnati Children's Hospital, USA at the CHA conference The Journey, in October 2012.
Find ways to prevent Disaster from knocking on your company door! Make sure your plan is in place as we anticipate a weekend storm - sales@telehouse.com
Workplace productivity is an estimate of how efficiently organizations utilize their resources to accomplish business objectives. Improving productivity is important because increasing it can increase revenue using the same or fewer resources.
Dialysis Centers: Automating and optimizing the workforce scheduling of patie...Einstein II
Workforce scheduling of patient care staff that include Registered
Nurses, licensed practical nurses and patient care technicians, who
provide dialysis treatments to patients is critical and complex for dialysis
centres. The recent reforms and regulatory pressures in the industry don’t
seem to help either. These regulatory reforms are forcing dialysis centres
to revisit their margins and costs in an unprecedented manner.
The NHS Bermuda Triangle by Marc Baker, Ian Taylor and Daniel T JonesLean Enterprise Academy
We've been applying Lean Thinking in healthcare for the past five years, Over that time we have discovered two things:
First, the good news. Lean works in healthcare. The Bad news: Lean will never take toon in the NHS as it stands: it is management that needs to change.
A presentation given by international keynote speaker Dr. Stephen Muething from Cincinnati Children's Hospital, USA at the CHA conference The Journey, in October 2012.
Thesis StatementI LeadershipA.B.C. II Individ.docxchristalgrieg
Thesis Statement:
I Leadership
A.
B.
C. II Individual Users
A.
B.
C. III Communication
A.
B.
C.IV Training
A.
B.
C.V Tools
A.
B.
Barriers of Change
Good evening. In an effort to assist managers in helping their staff adjust to an upcoming organizational change the facility system redesign team will be sharing some keys points as to why staff may objective to this change, but also provide some tools to help turn that tide. The system redesign team of will be provide these ideas in today’s presentation.
1
Agenda
Identify the organizational change
Describe the organizational change
Possible organizational and individual barriers to change
Possible factors that may influence the change
Motivational theories that will assist managers to motivate staff for the change
Today we will cover the organizational change is and its details. The possible organizational and individual barriers associated with this change. Possible factors that may influence this change and motivational theories that will assist managers to motivate their staff for this change.
2
Identify Organizational Change
Moving from paper medical records to electronic medial records (EMR)
A seven year process the federal government has been trying to work towards
Culture shift for all staff to become proficient in computer use and associated EMR program
Sharing information with competing health care facilities
Recognition by the American Hospital Association being a “Connected Hospital”
In Oct 2015, the U.S. News & World Report shared what the top 159 hospitals are that “have shown a commitment to use digital data in key aspects of patient care” (2015). Our organization happens to not be one of these. To remain competitive and to hold true to our mission statement of …”providing the best care to our patients…” the executive staff has decided to aggressively move towards using electronic medical records (EMR) in all that we do with our patient care.
Our facility is seven years behind in working towards the national goal of all medical records being electronic. The executive staff and facility board are well aware of the challenges we will face in making this transition, but they are confident with taking the correct steps in implementing an EMR system and training staff, this organization may soon find itself being one showing “commitment to their patients” on a national level.
A culture shirt in the way we use technology will need to occur as we embark on this change. The fear of sharing information needs to be subsided as sharing will actually strengthen our relationships with our patients vice pushing they away. This sharing will show how committed we are in ensuring that wherever they go to receive continued care that those medial staff will have access to their medical history and mitigate the chances of anything concerning their health being missed.
Through our efforts, our patients will soon see on a national level, the commitment we have as work ...
8 Management tools that improve Patient safetyImperago Ltd
In a post-Francis world, everybody is searching for the silver bullet to improve quality within the NHS.
The 1,782 page report by Robert Francis QC doesn't provide one bullet, but 290 recommendations.
But are we in danger of not seeing the wood from the trees?
There are some very basic - yet key - principles that still seem illusive for many trusts
Eminence Revenue Cycle Management for physicians includes patient verification, eligibility verification, prior-authorization, claim billing, payment posting, AR and Denial Management, Physician Billing Service. Eminence help physicians practice efficiently, while increasing their cash flow.
Benefits of Medical Billing Services for Small Businesses.pdfOmniMD
Learn about the many benefits of outsourcing your medical billing services to a trusted third party. It results in increased efficiency and savings on time
Learn about the many benefits of outsourcing your medical billing services to a trusted third party. It results in increased efficiency and savings on time
Burnout causes many problems in the lives of all people. But physician burnout especially impacts the well-being of patients, caregivers, and practices.
Often not all organizations and practices provide such a good atmosphere for their physicians to work with. And this creates friction between personnel and results in stressing physicians which could directly impact patients’ safety and the quality of care delivery.
The need for increased care coordination is important when it comes to the management of physician burnouts. Tasks like non-clinical which are associated with care coordination can add to the workload of the clinical team.
A great solution for this problem is using a non-clinical team to carefully coordinate care, connect patients with community resources, and complete the non-clinical outreach requirements of value-based care. This allows the clinical team to focus on clinical care alone.
read more : https://www.vozo.xyz/blog/the-effective-role-of-patient-portals-in-value-based-care/
Exercises in Measurement and validity For this assignment, you.docxSANSKAR20
Exercises in Measurement and validity
For this assignment, you will be working through questions regarding measurement and validity.. Your answers should be written in complete sentences. Some of the answers may require you to show your work.
1. You have just started a new diet program. To mark your progress, you start weighing yourself three times a day. You also notice that each time you weigh yourself in a given day, the number of pounds is different. Based on the rules regarding the scales of measurement, why is it wrong to weigh yourself more than once a day?
2. Your hospital administration has received several phone complaints from patients about rude behavior from registration staff and long wait times to register in both the Dermatology and Audiology Outpatient Clinics. A decision is made to send a patient satisfaction survey to all Outpatient Clinic patients to determine overall patient satisfaction in the hospital’s Clinic setting. The survey developed uses this type of scoring: 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree. What type of scale of measurement is this?
3. Your hospital wants to study patients readmitted within 30-days. What measures (e.g. Medicare patients only) would you recommend be included in the study (identify at least 3)? Where would you locate the data elements (e.g. admission records)?
4. Your hospital’s Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee undertook a quality review of Medication forms from discharges in the first quarter of the year and identified the errors by 5 general categories and then calculated the percentage of the total errors by category. The results were: Dosage Form 6%, Name confusion 13%, Communication 19%, Labeling 20%, and Human Factors 42%. As the HIM Director you are a member of the P&T Committee, the Chair asks you to prepare a graphic display of the error results for Medical Staff review. What is the best choice of a graphic display to present this data to the Medical Staff? And why
a. Line Graph
b. Bar Graph
c. Pie chart
d. Data Table
5. Provide a definition and example for the following terms:
a. Content validity
b. Construct validity
c. Criterion validity
Running head: BUSINESS AND USER REQUIREMENTS DOCUMENT DRAFT 1
BUSINESS AND USER REQUIREMENTS DOCUMENT DRAFT 6
Business and User Requirements Document Draft
thanks for your Draft report on the EHR project and requirements. There are 3 main parts to cover: Sources of information, departments affected: Provide more information about the clinical departments. HIM is not the "most important" department for this system. Clean up some of the writing possible errors or misunderstandings, too. 5 /7 Methods to gather information: Glad you mentioned interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires and explained all three. 7 /7
Requirements statements:3 /6 You are not quite understanding what Requirements are yet. They are what the system must do. We will get later on in the class, onto project implementation tasks such ...
Evidence-based Patient Assignments: How Using Automated and Intelligent Softw...Gene Pinder
Hospitals are under increasing pressure to improve care, lower costs and avoid nurse burnout and turnover. One overlooked area is the patient assignment process, which could benefit from intelligent software. This slide presentation lays out the case for it.
Administering Physician Compensation in 2016 and Beyond: What You Need to Con...Isaac Ullatil
There is a compelling need among physician enterprises to more efficiently track and measure the success of their physician compensation plans against organizational goals and objectives. We emphatically believe that physician leaders need to focus more on leading their organizations and less on the administrative components of their position. To that end, new generation applications should alleviate the challenges healthcare leaders face in the administration and management of physician compensation.
352018 IFSM 305 – Case Study Page 1 Midtown Fami.docxtarifarmarie
3/5/2018 IFSM 305 – Case Study Page | 1
Midtown Family Clinic
Case Study
In 1990, Dr. Harold Thompson opened the Midtown Family Clinic, a small internal medicine practice, in an
area with an increasing number of new family residences. Dr. Thompson has been the owner and manager
of the medical practice. He has two registered nurses, Vivian Halliday, and Maria Costa, to help him.
Usually, one nurse takes care of the front desk while the other nurse assists the doctor during the patient
visits. They rotate duties each day. Front desk duties include all administrative work from answering the
phone, scheduling appointments, taking prescription refill requests, billing, faxing, etc. So if on Monday
Nurse Halliday is helping the doctor, then it is Nurse Costa who takes care of the front desk and all office
work. The two nurses are constantly busy and running around, and patients are now accustomed to a
minimum 1-2 hour wait before being seen. If one nurse is absent, the situation is even worse in the clinic.
The clinic has three examination rooms so the owner is now looking into bringing a new physician or nurse
practitioner on board. This would help him grow his practice, provide better service to his patients, and
maybe reduce the patients’ waiting time. Dr. Thompson knows that this will increase the administrative
overhead and the two nurses will not be able to manage any additional administrative work. He faces
several challenges and cannot afford to hire any additional staff, so Dr. Thompson has to optimize his
administrative and clinical operations. The practice is barely covering the expenses and salaries at the
moment.
Dr. Thompson’s practice operation is all paper-based with paper medical records filling his front office
shelves. The only software the doctor has on his front office computer is a stand-alone appointment
scheduling system. Even billing insurance companies is done in a quasi-manual way. For billing insurance,
the front office nurse has to fax all the needed documentation to a third party medical billing company at
the end of the day. The medical billing company then submits the claim to the insurance company and
bills the patient. The clinic checks the status of the claims by logging into the medical billing system,
through a login that the medical billing company has provided the clinic to access its account. There is no
billing software installed at the practice, but the nurses open Internet Explorer to the URL of the medical
billing company and then use the login provided by the third party medical billing company. Of course, the
medical billing company takes a percentage of the amount that the clinic is reimbursed by the insurance.
Although the medical practice has the one PC with the scheduling software and an internet connection, it
does not have a Web site or any other technology, and essentially still operates the same as it did in 1990.
One.
352018 IFSM 305 – Case Study Page 1 Midtown Fami.docxShiraPrater50
3/5/2018 IFSM 305 – Case Study Page | 1
Midtown Family Clinic
Case Study
In 1990, Dr. Harold Thompson opened the Midtown Family Clinic, a small internal medicine practice, in an
area with an increasing number of new family residences. Dr. Thompson has been the owner and manager
of the medical practice. He has two registered nurses, Vivian Halliday, and Maria Costa, to help him.
Usually, one nurse takes care of the front desk while the other nurse assists the doctor during the patient
visits. They rotate duties each day. Front desk duties include all administrative work from answering the
phone, scheduling appointments, taking prescription refill requests, billing, faxing, etc. So if on Monday
Nurse Halliday is helping the doctor, then it is Nurse Costa who takes care of the front desk and all office
work. The two nurses are constantly busy and running around, and patients are now accustomed to a
minimum 1-2 hour wait before being seen. If one nurse is absent, the situation is even worse in the clinic.
The clinic has three examination rooms so the owner is now looking into bringing a new physician or nurse
practitioner on board. This would help him grow his practice, provide better service to his patients, and
maybe reduce the patients’ waiting time. Dr. Thompson knows that this will increase the administrative
overhead and the two nurses will not be able to manage any additional administrative work. He faces
several challenges and cannot afford to hire any additional staff, so Dr. Thompson has to optimize his
administrative and clinical operations. The practice is barely covering the expenses and salaries at the
moment.
Dr. Thompson’s practice operation is all paper-based with paper medical records filling his front office
shelves. The only software the doctor has on his front office computer is a stand-alone appointment
scheduling system. Even billing insurance companies is done in a quasi-manual way. For billing insurance,
the front office nurse has to fax all the needed documentation to a third party medical billing company at
the end of the day. The medical billing company then submits the claim to the insurance company and
bills the patient. The clinic checks the status of the claims by logging into the medical billing system,
through a login that the medical billing company has provided the clinic to access its account. There is no
billing software installed at the practice, but the nurses open Internet Explorer to the URL of the medical
billing company and then use the login provided by the third party medical billing company. Of course, the
medical billing company takes a percentage of the amount that the clinic is reimbursed by the insurance.
Although the medical practice has the one PC with the scheduling software and an internet connection, it
does not have a Web site or any other technology, and essentially still operates the same as it did in 1990.
One ...
Automated On-Call Scheduling - Small Step, Big Gains[2]
1. AUTOMATED
ON-CALL SCHEDULING:
SMALL STEP, BIG GAINS
Tackling administrative challenges in healthcare enterprises often
means big resource commitments that take years to pay off. But on-call
scheduling technology can reverse that equation, delivering impressive
ROI from a relatively modest investment of time and money.
sponsored by
2. | 2
Hospital administrators face a long list of
seemingly unrelated challenges, including
bolstering physician-hospital relations; personnel
shortages and retention; patient safety, quality,
and satisfaction; absorbing acquisitions; and,
above all, finances, especially as the migration to
value-based care proceeds.1
Faced with such big organizational challenges,
it’s natural to assume equally big initiatives and
investments are needed to address them. But
sometimes a major leap forward can be made with
a relatively small change. An everyday inefficiency
that seems to impact only a few may actually have
ripple effects throughout an organization. Finding
and fixing this type of problem can quickly deliver
disproportionate bang-for-the-buck.
The physician call schedule is often one such
area. Call scheduling can be a source of persistent
frustration to doctors — but the negative effects
of inefficient scheduling can go far beyond
the physician team. The hassles, errors, and
miscommunications inefficient scheduling creates
reverberate through almost every area of the
organization.
Intelligent automation can solve many of the
challenges of on-call scheduling — including many
that are less visible on the surface. Automating
call scheduling can quickly make it easier, more
reliable, and less likely to cause conflicts. And
just as the pain caused by inefficient scheduling
echoes beyond the physician team, the benefits of
improving it can radiate through an entire hospital
system.
Real-time schedule updates mean
improved efficiency and reduced risk
Reliably knowing who’s scheduled on call from a
department or practice is critical not just for the
members of that team. Colleagues throughout
the system, from the hospital switchboard to the
ED to the OR, have to know which clinicians are
available, and how to reach them.
The old-school approach to scheduling — whether
by white board, spreadsheet, sticky notes, or some
combination of all three — makes quickly and
accurately communicating this crucial information
very difficult.
1 For example, in its 2015 survey of hospital CEOs, published in February, 2016, the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) found that the top ten
issues confronting hospitals include financial challenges (#1), patient safety and quality (#2), personnel shortages (#4), patient satisfaction (#5), physician
relations (#6), and reorganization (#10).
Automated
On-call Scheduling:
Small Step, Big Gains
3. | 3
Consider the dozens of on-call schedules that
are typically created either within a hospital or
in the practices of physicians on staff. When
each of these schedules is created on paper or a
spreadsheet, someone in the hospital must gather
and assemble the information for everyone to
use. That usually means a lot of calling, collating,
and distributing of information. And what happens
when — as happens so often — someone’s schedule
changes? The entire labor-intensive process must
begin all over again. All of this manual constructing,
collecting, updating, and distributing of schedules is
not just inefficient, it creates more opportunities for
human error.
The consequences of out-of-date call information
can range from annoying to tragic. An error might
mean that the wrong physician is awakened at
3:00 a.m. Or it might mean a significant delay in
patient care because no one could figure out how
to reach the right physician in time.
Commonplace events like doctors swapping call
on their own or a clinician getting a new phone
number can have severe consequences if there’s
no way to be sure everyone is aware of the change.
As healthcare organizations grow, and physicians
frequently practice at multiple locations, these
communication challenges — and the possibility of
errors — multiply even faster.
Technology can address
this problem in an elegantly
simple, intuitive way: by
ensuring that there is one,
and only one, source of
schedule information.
A thorny data problem with a
straightforward solution
Healthcare is not the first industry to grapple
with information siloed in multiple systems that
don’t automatically update each other. In other
business settings, database systems have evolved
to address this problem by maintaining a “single
source of truth.” A single source of truth means
that while data can be published and used in
many systems, each important bit of information is
actually stored and managed in just one place.
Today’s automated on-call scheduling solutions take
advantage of this powerful idea to simplify commu-
nication and ensure accuracy. With just one data
source for any element of the schedule, a single up-
date will make accurate data available to the entire
organization. The chances of obsolete or erroneous
schedules circulating the hospital, causing problems
and extra work, are greatly reduced.
Normally, establishing a single source of truth from
legacy data can be daunting. But call scheduling
offers a rare chance to automate where no legacy
system likely exists. It’s a project that can be a
breath of fresh air to hospital technology teams
beleaguered by difficult integrations. The upside
for everyone who relies on the schedule is large
and undeniable. And with no legacy system to
convert, there are fewer reasons to resist the move
to a new solution.
A successful transition to technology that makes
everyone’s work lives easier is an excellent way
to demonstrate that technology can add a lot of
value. As such, it’s an excellent way to gain buy-in
4. | 4
(and a bit of patience) for the larger, more difficult
implementations that may be on the way.
A not-so-small task with significant
hidden costs
At first blush, automating the physician on-call
schedule may not seem like a significant cost-
cutting opportunity. On the surface, it seems like a
relatively small, specialized job. And in some ways
it is: even in large teams, call scheduling may be
handled by just a few people who take care of it
alongside their “day jobs.”
But because the clinical rules that drive schedul-
ing are complex and critical, one or more of those
people will likely be a senior physician. This means
that scarce, precious physician time is diverted from
patient care — a significant hidden cost.
Besides clinical rules, there are always other
dependencies that accumulate over time —
constraints due to physicians’ obligations at other
facilities, and, of course, personal preferences. Ad
hoc constraints like vacations, parental leave, and
other absences must also be worked into the mix.
Documenting all these rules
for automation can seem
daunting. Over time, the
employees who work the
schedule internalize the
patchwork of constraints that
must be accommodated.
It may seem easier, and
even less costly, to let these
reluctant experts keep preparing and distributing
the schedule manually.
But the picture looks different when you consider
the time devoted by your experts to scheduling
over not just a single month, but a period of
months or years. It doesn’t take long before the
hours invested in scheduling add up to significant
drain on important resources. What’s more, in
any given scheduling period, the amount of time
devoted to the task can balloon when unexpected
changes are needed.
The difficulty of on-call scheduling has also
crept upward in recent years. The number of
subspecialties has proliferated, increasing the
complexity of assigning call. This makes the
process more time-consuming, and mistakes
harder to avoid.
Scheduling software, on the other hand, has
evolved to become much easier to implement.
Even complicated scheduling rules can usually
be automated. By automating the schedule, you’ll
recapture the clinician time currently spent on it for
months and years ahead — quickly paying back your
investment.
Hard to quantify, yet priceless:
engagement and morale
Besides reducing errors, making managing
the schedule much easier, and simplifying
communication, automated call scheduling offers
another benefit hand-crafted scheduling sorely
lacks: transparency.
5. | 5
The traditional, manual way of scheduling can
feel like a “black box.” Physicians may submit
scheduling preferences, but have little sense of
how they’re evaluated against other requests and
department needs. When requests are denied
and the decision-making process seems opaque,
physicians may feel unsure that the process is fair
— especially in a larger organization, where it might
not be easy to ask about it.
Such qualms may seem like minor problems — the
sort of irritations we all bear in organizations. But
any erosion of trust can make engaging physicians
harder. As hospitals and healthcare systems
grow larger, their challenges are growing apace.
Healthcare enterprises need physicians to lead
diverse teams and tackle big, complex problems in
care delivery. Establishing and maintaining trust is
critical to keeping physicians focused and working
together on issues that can’t be solved without their
brainpower.
When physician morale suffers, the employees
they work with feel the pain, too. The hassles of
scheduling the old-fashioned way have long been
a predictable source of conflicts between people
who need to work closely together. Automating
the schedule is a relatively small and easy step
that can improve the esprit de corps of the entire
clinical team.
An automation opportunity with
unusually powerful benefits
It is hard to imagine an administrative task in
healthcare that has more potential to be improved
by automation than on-call scheduling.
Planning the schedule is a
focused activity, normally
managed by just a few, even
though entire hospitals
depend on its execution. And
as healthcare enterprises
have grown more complex,
the time required to prepare schedules in
traditional ways has mushroomed, as has the
stress the process causes.
Automating scheduling reduces costly manual
work (and re-work), errors, liability, and stress on
the team. By boosting transparency, it can even
improve team morale. Few technology solutions
have the potential to deliver such immediate
and profound payoffs. And for organizations that
are burdened with inefficient scheduling using
whiteboards or spreadsheets, the process of
conversion may even be easier than expected, with
no existing data stores to integrate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurie Morgan of Capko & Morgan is a medical
practice management consultant, speaker,
and author. Her consulting work focuses on
helping practices generate and capture more
revenue, optimize their workflows, and use
technology to improve profitability.
Laurie is a frequent contributor to
healthcare publications and blogs such as
Repertoire, PracticeLink, and Physicians
Practice. She is also the creator of the
popular “ManagementRx” series of practice
management ebooks.
Laurie is a graduate of Brown University and
Stanford University.
6. ABOUT THE SPONSOR
Across the continuum of care, Kronos® for Healthcare helps providers of all sizes
develop their workforce into a competitive advantage to support the delivery of value-
based healthcare. Kronos EZCall™ is a leading automated clinician scheduling solution
that creates flexible, fair, and equitable call and shift schedules helping organizations
staff smarter and faster. Kronos EZCall, integrated with Kronos timekeeping, HR, and
payroll solutions, provides a unified and seamless workforce management platform
enabling practices, hospitals, and health systems to reduce administrative burdens,
gain a holistic view into the entire organization’s workforce, and improve compliance by
adhering to one standard across the organization.
For more information, please visit www.ezcall.com/demo