Scheduling Software Builds Foundation for Healthcare Staffing

October 17, 2019

Working in the healthcare industry can be challenging. It’s a job that requires a multitude of skills, including working amidst a hectic, fast-paced environment that changes rapidly. Healthcare staff often need to be in multiple situations throughout their shift in order to serve various patients.

For those in charge of nurse staffing, it can be an even bigger challenge, as they are faced with the heavy burden of trying to ensure that all of their shifts are covered, while still maintaining employee satisfaction so that they don’t lose high quality staff.

Ditch the Pen and Paper

With so many employees to look after, it’s nearly impossible to keep up using old fashioned methods of scheduling such as pen and paper and Excel spreadsheets. And we’re all too familiar with playing the never-ending game of trying to reach staff via telephone or leaving messages that often go unanswered. Piles of messy papers, Post It notes with schedule changes and time-off requests, and Excel simply don’t cut it anymore. When you’re juggling schedules for hundreds, sometimes thousands of employees, and working to cover shifts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week it can seem like trying to solve a puzzle without all of the pieces.

Keep it Organized and Optimized

Finding an organizational solution to meet the complexity of healthcare scheduling has become increasingly difficult as the real threat of nursing shortages persist. This is in part due to frustrated, over worked nurses. Meanwhile, healthcare organizations face mounting pressures to drastically reduce their costs. Since healthcare scheduling depends on each piece of the puzzle to keep things running efficiently, nurse scheduling as well as optimizing your current nursing staff by working smarter not harder will ensure that your organization has a sustainable staffing strategy.

The question then becomes, how is that possible given all of the challenges?

Online Scheduling Software

Thanks to healthcare staffing solutions like online employee scheduling software, all of the tools you need to streamline and organize your entire scheduling operation is provided for you. This fresh, smart approach simplifies and automates the complexity of the healthcare staffing issue by saving time and empowering staff while optimizing the scheduling process to fill more shifts, increase employee satisfaction, and lower labor costs.

One way to cut costs is by avoiding unnecessary overtime. By providing managers with the ability to view staffing in real-time, they can easily see which employees are needing additional hours, and which employees have already worked enough and are approaching overtime. For those employees wanting overtime, this provides schedulers with the ability to fulfill overtime requests much more easily, while giving those who are overworked a much needed break.

24/7 Access is Key

Another benefit to using online scheduling software is the ability to streamline and improve the way your organization communicates. Staffing managers are no longer tied to their phone as they cross names off a phone tree. Schedule360 software offers instant messaging to all qualified staff, informing them of possible shift changes, open and available shifts, on call scheduling, and more. Employees can view their schedules from any mobile device with Internet access, anytime, day or night.

To learn more about how our simplified labor staffing solutions can help your organization save time and money, streamline and improve the communication process, and manage and reduce overtime use, contact Schedule360 today for a customized demo. You’ll soon wonder how you ever scheduled without it!