Save Time and Money with the Right Nurse Scheduling Software

January 5, 2022

Providing quality patient care is directly related to how healthcare facilities manage staffing. Nursing schedules come with unique challenges. Hot shifts, agency utilization, and keeping overtime in check are just some of the scheduling burdens your admins and schedulers face regularly.

It’s a daily balance of providing outstanding patient care while dealing with tight budgetary constraints and complex scheduling issues. Managing labor costs and following compliance rules without sacrificing the morale of your nursing staff is made easier with the right tools.

Nurse manager wearing glasses holding a clipboard and writing on it with a black pen.

Many healthcare administrators are experiencing a significant reduction in scheduling concerns after implementing a rules-based, robust, and scalable nurse scheduling software.

A nurse scheduling software solution that addresses common challenges related to forecasting labor requirements and managing daily staff schedules can make a positive impact in your unit. Implementing something new when you feel like you’re doing all you can just to maintain normal workloads seems counterproductive. However, with the right staff scheduling software, healthcare facility managers can easily develop workflow efficiency, increase staff morale and accountability, and lower operational costs while ensuring patients are receiving balanced quality care on every shift.

Schedule Transparency

Our cloud-based nurse scheduling software provides complete schedule transparency, giving you the ability to view your unit schedules in ways that make managing a complicated workforce easier. Our software gives employees 24/7 access to real-time schedules from any internet-connected device. This level of schedule transparency results in a reduction of call offs and missed shifts. In uncertain times, a scheduling solution that evolves with current needs, has guided automation capabilities, and provides real-time one-click reporting can be invaluable to the way you manage your staffing needs.

Shift Forecasting

A robust scheduling software provides accurate forecasting of upcoming shift demands to reduce last minute OT requests. Nurse scheduling software can uncover daily, weekly, and shift level patterns in patient flow in selected units, making it easier for providers to forecast demand. Healthcare facility managers can obtain the information they need to match nursing resources to the patient flow. All of this leads to improving quality of care while valuing your staff-which is hands down your most important resource.

Processing Call-Offs and Time-Off Requests

Our nurse scheduling software solution includes a standard automated procedure for both call-offs and time-off requests. Schedule360 software allows you to process call-offs in a streamlined way. Schedulers simply log in, oversee select regions, and process the call-offs systematically, so you can optimize your resources instead of further depleting them.

Whenever an employee “calls off” online within the Schedule360 interface, the request is listed as “pending”. This can even be broken down further by market, region, district and geography with filters on all of them.

When the scheduler is processing the call-off, they have the option to:

  • Reopen the shift
  • Make it HOT (i.e., Critical Opening)
  • Dispatch it immediately to all Qualified and Available Staff

With a standard procedure for staff time-off requests, you create transparency and staff-wide processes with guidelines set by management so there’s no longer a question about how requesting time off is submitted and approved. Furthermore, staff who share skill sets and credentials can swap shifts without the need for management approval because you set the guidelines in the front end. As long as they meet the required qualifications, staff can pick up more hours and easily get a shift covered that they can no longer work without demanding more of your time to work it all out.

With a centralized procedure for call-offs and time-off requests, you’re no longer managing this  in separate locations with different processes. It’s one consistent, straightforward, and easy-to-follow-system across the board.

Credential Tracking

Many organizations use a separate process to manage credentials than the system they use to schedule employees. Doing so can become inefficient when bouncing back and forth between the two, and manually cross-referencing often leads to unintentional human error.

Healthcare providers rely on their credential tracking system to ensure balanced coverage on every shift. Keeping up with the demands placed on you during a pandemic can stretch you and your staff to your limits, and gaps in coverage based on lack of credentials in staffing can have serious implications.

Implementing nurse scheduling software makes it easy for schedulers to keep track of employee licensure and skills which are conveniently located in employee profiles. Skills requiring recertification are tracked from the expiration date and the system alerts employees 60 days prior to expiration. Credential tracking prevents employees lacking necessary credentials from filling shifts they aren’t qualified to fulfill.

Internal Messaging

Effectively communicating urgent scheduling needs to your staff timely and efficiently can be invaluable, so our nurse scheduling software includes an internal messaging platform. With enhanced internal messaging, administrators can quickly and efficiently relay any vital information to staff without having to make time consuming phone calls or typing out email messages that you aren’t even sure employees will receive. By segmenting your messages, you can select who receives the alert based on current needs and avoids over-messaging your entire staff for matters that only apply to a few. Sent messages are time stamped when opened, which eliminates-or at the very least greatly reduces-the all too familiar breakdown in communication that can happen when relying on manual methods.

The Solution is Schedule360

Retaining high quality nurses and reducing turnover rates is easier with safer staffing and smarter scheduling. Schedule360 makes it simple to value employee work/life balance. Optimizing your current resources more effectively results in happier staff which means more retention and better patient care.

If you’re still hesitant to implement nurse scheduling software because of the initial investment factor, or a lack of time to commit to setting it up, we’d like to help. Our clients have noticed a fast and measurable ROI through overtime reduction, agency dependency, and a more efficient scheduling process just by utilizing our award-winning software. Schedule360 is a proven solution and extremely user-friendly.

Schedule360 is designed to work in any given situation and is fully customizable to fit your unique scheduling and workforce management needs. If you’re looking for a configured scheduling software solution to manage your common scheduling pain points, contact Schedule360. We Know Scheduling™