Scheduling Support for Virtual Working Environments

January 20, 2021

The healthcare industry plays a significant role in supporting the health and safety of people around the world. While healthcare professionals are accustomed to working in a difficult and complex environment, things have been made even more challenging by recent events, mainly the spread of COVID-19.

New Feature Based on Real Client Feedback

When a current client of ours, a large pharmacy and clinic chain that also offers primary care services (both in person and via telehealth) reached out to us requesting our help in creating a new type of schedule for their COVID-19 testing implementation, we responded enthusiastically and immediately went to work.

This client’s main issue was they needed a way to track new training for their providers and only offer shifts for COVID-19 testing to only those who had already gone through the required training while still maintaining oversight of normal daily operations across multiple locations. The new schedule shift-type could then be assigned by a central scheduler, who was responsible for overseeing the provider scheduling for this primary care service. The adaptability of Schedule360® to provide enhanced workflow allowed the client to ensure adequately-trained personnel to cover the demand for COVID testing while not sacrificing productivity for regularly scheduled shifts.

Easing the Burden of Communicating Daily Assignments

A second feature request, from another client, was the need to seamlessly communicate across a specified market, who the provider for the day was for each location via email in a streamlined, efficient way. Previously, the provider of the day would have to call each pharmacy location to inform the pharmacist that they were the assigned provider for that shift.

While this may not sound like a significant time strain at face value, the cumulative effect of it was a major problem. The old method was extremely time consuming as it tasked each provider to place 10-20 phone calls per day, first thing in the morning, to every pharmacy, letting them know who was overseeing their daily testing processes.

In response to this pain point, we automated messaging to dispatch the necessary daily communication, greatly eliminating the time consuming and less than ideal morning routine for the provider, allowing them to focus the resources on other more important matters related to quality patient care.

These are just two examples of many that demonstrate how enhanced workflow paired with efficient communication and transparency of the schedule can enhance the efficiency of the scheduling process, saving time and eliminating frustration for key employees, allowing more focus on serving patients while alleviating non-productive stress from a manual scheduling process.

These features bridge the gap between provider and pharmacy through a scheduling system that evolves and adapts with the needs of its customers. A further example of evolving to meet clients’ needs is illustrated through Schedule360’s introduction of another new feature that allows shifts to be coded and credentialed as remote shifts, while working seamlessly with your current scheduling process responsible for streamlining and organizing your normal daily scheduling needs. Using Schedule360 allows you the ability to keep your entire team up to date on who is working these shifts, using the internal messaging capabilities and schedule transparency already provided by Schedule360.

Credential tracking is another useful feature that aids in providing the most configurable scheduling solution available. A robust system with defined scheduling rules connected to required employee credentials ensures only those with proper credentials are able to fill shifts requiring certain skills, so you can’t schedule an employee who isn’t properly credentialed for remote work into one of these virtual shifts.

Allocating Resources for the Best Patient Care

You already know how absolutely vital it is to ensure that staff members aren’t working outside of their state licensure, credentials, and skills, so the ability to add new virtual organizational structures to work within your existing physical organizational operations is one way to effortlessly oversee both virtual and brick and mortar shifts together with ease.

These features are the ideal configurations for companies looking to make the transition from an in-person workforce to a virtual workforce, either exclusively or in combination with each other, and for providers and healthcare teams who have already added virtual shifts to their scheduling looking for an easy way to keep it all in check.

Let’s Talk

If your team is transitioning or already working with remote teams, contact Schedule360 today to learn more about how easy it is to get you up and running with our fully supported implementation and training process. Streamline your communication and save time by adding Schedule360’s new remote shift type into your current scheduling process.