Best Practices for Creating and Managing a Telehealth Staff Schedule

December 1, 2021

The use of Telehealth services was already growing pre-pandemic, inspiring many providers to join the new at-home evolution. Telehealth has become a lifeline for patients with a critical need to stay home. Telehealth is an excellent way for providers to improve patient care, while reducing costs, and increasing patient satisfaction. As the demand for Telehealth services grows a question arises:  How do you streamline the staff scheduling process for your Telehealth services? is exploding.

You need a web-based scheduling software solution to efficiently manage provider shift schedules. Qualification tracking is the main concern with Telehealth. The complexity of tracking and managing provider scheduling and credentials by facility, licensure, or appointment type simply isn’t feasible when performed manually with excel spreadsheets or comparable systems.

The potential for scheduling errors increases dramatically as the number of providers and locations grow, leading to potential negative outcomes, like accidentally scheduling the wrong provider in the wrong facility who is lacking the necessary credentials. This type of error can lead to a variety of negative consequences including endangering patients in your care.

Schedule360’s Telehealth provider scheduling software can help you meet the demands associated with Telemedicine scheduling. Using our software, Telehealth providers will oversee organized schedules that can meet the evolving demands of any busy provider practice or hospital rotation.

Schedule Transparency

Schedule360 provides employees with complete access to their schedules 24/7 from any mobile device with internet. Transparency in scheduling reduces the instances of missed shifts, eliminates schedule confusion, gaps in coverage, and frees up schedulers to direct their resources more effectively. Easily schedule and coordinate multiple staffing regions or groups within large enterprises, no matter the location. You can also view the reporting dashboard to help identify any gaps in coverage. With Schedule360 software, you’ll get a high-level macro view from a centralized location of all needs across all locations. With this kind of accessibility, you’ll be able to isolate and recognize coverage needs, and then open shifts for back fill that may have fallen through the cracks of provider coverage.

Internal Messaging Capabilities

Our Telehealth provider scheduling software offers secure messaging for better collaboration between all staff, including those seeing patients in person and those via telemedicine services. Using our secure cloud-based hosted application you’ll be able to communicate with employees in real-time. Critical staffing needs can be immediately dispatched to your staff 24/7 with the added benefits of segmenting recipients based on current needs. Messages are time-stamped when read to ensure they are received, resulting in greater employee accountability and administrative efficiency.

Hot Shift Coverage with Ease

Hot shifts are critical needs that allow for employee self-scheduling through the optimization of Day/Night, Qualifications for departments, and the allowance of overtime hours for staff at the weekly overtime threshold. These shifts can be dispatched directly to employees as urgent messages to cover gaps and allow qualified employees, employees beneath their target hours, or those looking for additional hours to pick up a hot shift first. Staff scheduling software can allow an organization more transparency for resources and maximize available staff across the enterprise helping to eliminate the need for overtime or supplemental agency labor.

Credential and Qualification Tracking

One of the greatest challenges in managing a Telehealth schedule is ensuring every shift is covered with qualified staff. Manually keeping track of this across regions is time consuming and interferes with patient care. Schedule360 has implemented color-coded staff reports clearly displaying which employees’ licensure and credentials are nearing renewal. System alerts can notify your employees 60 days prior to expiration eliminating costly lapses in qualifications necessary to your workflow.  Skills requiring recertification are tracked from the expiration date and are linked back to the credential page for real-time updates. Quality care depends on the ability to optimize shifts utilizing your existing staff. If everyone is up to date on their respective credentials, your shifts are well balanced, and you’re able to provide high quality patient care with less administrative effort.

Real-Time Reporting

Whether your providers are all in the same geographical location or spread out across the country, with telemedicine provider scheduling software, your staff can stay connected. Integrated, real-time reports allow one-click management of work targets and provide the proper tools to quickly respond to current shift demands based on real-time needs. Configured reports provide shift level patterns based on patient flow so you can forecast upcoming demands much more accurately.

Care Coordination

Telemedicine software provides the ability to schedule multiple areas on the same day, which is important because it’s virtual and providers can service more than one area at a time. For example, a provider might be covering 50 different spots in one day. Telemedicine software provides expanded reach of care by allowing specialists to provide care in rural areas and locations where medical specialists are in short supply.

Efficient Workflow

When you implement a quality telemedicine software platform like Schedule360, you’ll notice an immediate streamlined approach to staff scheduling. You’ll experience many benefits including increased efficiency, improved clinical workflow, improved healthcare quality, reduced patient costs, expanded reach of care, reduced exposure to pathogens, reduced patient no-shows, and increased patient satisfaction.

Telehealth is Here to Stay

Changing your current scheduling approach in the middle of a pandemic may seem counterintuitive. At the same time, you know something must change, and demands for Telehealth are only projected to grow. Telehealth has come of age as we have become dependent on our mobile devices to carry out our day-to-day activities, including receiving healthcare services. This is the new normal and there’s no turning back now, so why not head into the future of Telehealth with the very best telemedicine scheduling software solution available on the market today?

Adopting an efficient schedule management process to ensure your critical shifts are covered is a key component to providing high quality care to your patients. Schedule360 provides all the tools necessary to accomplish this for you. We are here to guide you through a seamless transition. Making a small change in the way you oversee scheduling will have an enormous impact on your scheduling processes. Contact Schedule360 today for a configured demo of our amazing scheduling solution.