5 Innovative Features That Simplify Healthcare Staff Scheduling

October 5, 2022

Managing a nursing staff schedule can sometimes feel overwhelming, especially if your process is less efficient than you’d like it to be. It’s a delicate balancing act of trying to meet patient demands while keeping your nurses happy. Scheduling issues can lead to burnout, and the lack of staffing transparency and accountability is pushing nurses to leave the profession.

To streamline and simplify nurse scheduling, many healthcare administrators rely on nurse scheduling software. This not only ensures every shift is properly staffed, but it also reduces the amount of time spent on scheduling, reduces overtime expenses, and improves communication.

Schedule360 offers one of the most customizable and user-friendly employee scheduling software tools available on the market today. It is our goal to meet the needs of our clients, which is why we’re always striving for ways to improve our scheduling software. In response, we developed some innovative features to improve our software based on customer feedback from our users.

Daily Staff Totals Feature

Occasionally a client reaches out with a need for a new or improved feature. If something isn’t working for a client, we want to know about it so we can improve an existing feature or develop a new configured solution to fit their specific needs.

Recently one of our hospital clients requested we develop a feature to accurately calculate the daily staff totals per nursing unit. Specifically, they needed to know the core staffing numbers of their RNs, broken down in specific hour increments to ensure adequate coverage. Additionally, as their department consists of several units, they needed to isolate Core Staffing Totals by unit with the ability to run the same report for other units and compare these numbers immediately whenever needed.

Our new Daily Staff Totals feature gives admin level staff the ability to run specific coverage reports in any hourly increment to accurately determine scheduled Core Staff by licensure.

Nurse Division Screen

The addition of the Division Screen for Nursing feature provides an efficient way to edit or add employee profiles. The Division Screen can be activated with a click of the mouse and functions to efficiently organize the admin-level view for selecting Employee Qualified and Assigned areas within a hospital. Prior to having this feature, if the division screen was turned off, the admin link for the employee set up would display every single unit in the hospital, requiring the admin user to scroll continuously to find the correct units to check when building or editing employee profiles. Our large health system clients appreciate having this addition as previously assigning employees to the correct departments took so much longer than it does now.

Enhanced Messaging Capabilities

Schedule360 understands how critical it is for management to be able to quickly and effectively communicate their scheduling needs to staff. That is why our employee scheduling software is equipped with an integrated tool from the start. However, as we continue to delve into our client’s needs, we’re always looking for ways to improve our scheduling software. One such improvement is providing clients with enhanced messaging capabilities.

The Enhanced Messaging Capabilities feature allows admins to message only those individuals on the schedule at various levels of their site structure. For example, admins can select staff based on their nursing unit, department, facility, enterprise, or across multiple campuses. They can send out a message to only employees scheduled to work that day or to everyone on the list.

Employees don’t like being bombarded with messages, so this messaging feature reduces the occurrence of over-messaging and helps you fill urgent needs quickly and efficiently.

Workforce Management Reporting

Recently, a health system client of ours requested that we develop an integrated workforce management report that contained metrics to allow them to clearly view and measure multiple parameters by employees to drive labor target compliance for the hospital’s respective units. They wanted the report to be flexible with the ability to be queried based on individual needs of the last user. Schedule360 realized this report would not only benefit this client but all System Health clients, so we worked directly with the customer to develop the reporting tool.

Reminders

Another innovative feature we created based on customer feedback is the Reminders feature. Employees can automatically set up shift reminders by email, text or both that dispatch the day before their scheduled shift. This is especially helpful for those picking up or trading a shift for a day or time they don’t normally work. Employees must opt-in to use this feature, but managers can require that their employees opt-in if they have a habit of tardiness or missed shifts.

Constantly Improving Our Software to Fit Your Needs

By proactively working with our clients to incorporate their specific needs for staff schedule management, we continually improve the functionality of Schedule360. We frequently update our features to suit the needs of our customers. We value customer feedback tremendously. It’s how we learn what customers love about our software and how we continue to improve it. We tailor our software to our clients, always, in addition to providing outstanding 24/7 customer support.

Schedule360 delivers staff scheduling software designed to fit the specific needs of your organization. We provide you with the innovative features you need without wading through those you don’t. Call us today for a customized demo to learn how we can help you achieve a more efficient scheduling process.