It’s 8 o’clock on Monday morning. You show up to work, grab a cup of coffee, and prepare to start working on the schedule.
You open up five spreadsheets with everybody’s names and availability, the spreadsheet with how many shifts you need for the next two weeks, the sticky notes with scribbled unavailability times, and finally, your scheduling tool. After hours of going back and forth with the schedule, you finally send it out for the next two weeks.
Only to immediately get a text from three people that they were scheduled during their off-time. You open up the calendar again and spend the next hour shifting people around to make it work. After the headache of creating the schedule the first time, you’re tired, frustrated, and can’t find someone to cover that open shift.
Not to mention last week, your facility went from five patients to 30 within a day, so you had to call in extra coverage. There was also that one nurse who called out sick at the last minute, leaving you scrambling to find someone to fill the gap. What if you’re short-staffed again?
And instead of staying on budget last week, you went over when you accidentally scheduled two full-time nurses when you only needed one. Since they both were full-time employees and required the hours, you had to keep them both, even though you had five patients. The dread of having to explain to payroll what happened makes you want to take a nice, long vacation. But, of course, then who would do the scheduling?
This scenario is all too common for administrators. Manual, disconnected systems create blocks, and human error is almost inevitable when being pulled in 30 different directions as administrators try to maintain a safe, staffed facility in a fast-paced healthcare environment.
The hiccups of modern-day healthcare staffing
The way facilities are currently staffing through outdated systems can no longer adapt to the speed and consistency required for a modern-day healthcare system.
Healthcare requires strategy, a clear-cut plan with known outcomes. But healthcare facilities are simply hoping for the best when it comes to staffing, working on reactive systems that can’t keep up with the ever-changing demand.
An efficiently-run floor starts with ensuring a reliable schedule because the staff who are taking care of patients can be the difference between positive patient outcomes and dissatisfied patients. So when administrators are using systems like spreadsheets, sticky notes, and pieces of paper to do their scheduling, they’re increasing the administrative burden, which can negatively impact long-term career satisfaction.
These manual processes also don’t allow administrators to easily fill last-minute needs. They have to search through disjointed data in order to find someone who might be able to pick up a shift, while still having to go through the whole process of contacting them to see if they can take the shift. When patient census changes, there’s no simple way to send out a shift to a float pool or internal staff that doesn’t require attention to be taken away from the floor.
Consolidating internal and external staff in one place
The disconnected, complicated scheduling systems of the past no longer have to be the norm. Medely’s Talent Fusion Core allows facilities to centralize and automate all internal healthcare staffing processes.
Core isn’t just a scheduler; it gives a full picture of internal staffing with AI-powered predictive tools that simplify scheduling. From staffing trends to tracking budget spend to alerts to open shifts, Core simplifies all of your internal staffing tools into one healthcare staffing hub, reducing those 30 open tabs and scribbled notes.
Functions of Core
Scheduling tool
Our technology takes scheduling off your plate by utilizing powerful algorithms based on user-defined outcomes, hard constraints, and staff preferences to create the most cost-effective, efficient, and equitable schedule.
It’s simple. Enter your current staff, whether that’s float pool, full-time, or part-time staff, into Core, and fine-tune your goals, like minimizing overtime. Once your staff is in Core, they can enter unavailable times and their own shift preferences that the system can use to create the best possible schedule.
When you enter the scheduling tool, you include how many shifts you need, what the positions are, and how many of those positions you need on the floor. With the already integrated guardrails in place for scheduling, such as verifying credentials and preventing overlapping shifts, our algorithm will sort through all positions you’re scheduling for and place the right internal staff on the right shift. After you publish the schedule, it will be shared automatically with staff through the Medely mobile app.
Easy integration for open shifts or extra staff needed
If there are any scheduling conflicts or unfilled shifts, these will be flagged for you to adjust as necessary before approving the schedule. If your priority staff aren’t available and you have an open shift, you can send it to your float pool, or Medely Core can easily be integrated with our Flex option, allowing you to waterfall open shifts directly from your scheduler into Medely’s marketplace of per-diem talent.
Administrators can automate the waterfall to push the shift out to Medely’s marketplace or external vendors if the shift isn’t filled in a certain period of time, ensuring that coverage is found, regardless of internal staff availability.
This waterfall provides added flexibility and security that open shifts will be covered. In the case of increased patient census or last-minute callouts on an already tight internal staffing team, sending a shift to the Flex can be a more cost-effective option for fluctuating healthcare staffing needs. Ultimately, preventing canceled procedures, costly overtime, or being short-staffed.
Access labor insights and budget reports
Core provides an easy look into your schedule and helps you keep track of budget spending. Staffing is expensive, and changes in the schedule can cause surprises when you see how much you spent that month. Core provides you with real-time insight into labor costs across your staffing, allowing you to see trends and adjust to better align with budget goals.
Core is an easier way to manage your workforce and gives you more control over your entire facility, leading to happier administrators and employees, reduced spend on staff, and ultimately better patient safety.
Learn how Allied Digestive Health used Core to cut scheduling time by 66%
Allied Digestive Health, a large gastroenterology system in the tri-state area, needed a better, simpler system for staffing. They were relying on complex, unintuitive systems for scheduling their network of anesthesia providers throughout all facilities in New York and New Jersey.
Their current system was complicated and wasn’t easily adopted by their clinicians. On top of the inefficiencies, it would also take hours to schedule, eating up valuable time to be spent on other projects. After adopting Medely Core, they reduced scheduling time by 66% and have found 18% savings.
Check out the full case study here.
Interested in Core? Talk to your account manager to learn more. If you’re not a Medely customer yet, click here to schedule a demo!