Six years ago, Children’s Nebraska’s health care system didn’t have a single source of truth when it came to planning.
THE PROBLEM
Children’s Nebraska was growing 10% per year from a provider perspective, and during that time the scheduling and generation of on-call services was done across many systems in different departments – from writing them down on paper to saving them to email calendars and following it. in a spreadsheet. There were many different methods, and no one could keep track of them all.
To streamline the process, staff combined all existing scheduling data and sent it to the communications center, where someone would manually enter and maintain the schedule in a Microsoft Word or Excel file.
This meant that if someone had to make a last-minute schedule change, it wasn’t sent to the communications center, meaning staff didn’t have a single source of truth for the schedule.
It also presented challenges when push came to shove schedule appointments in providers’ calendars. Often, providers were double-booked because division administrators had to consult the different scheduling formats to book an appointment.
“The problem continued to get worse as the number of our health care providers grew,” says Dr. Stephen Dolter, chief medical officer at Children’s Nebraska. “Managing schedules in this manual and disparate way quickly became too much of an administrative burden, and we knew we needed technology to automate these processes.
“We ultimately turned to QGenda for workforce management technology that can quickly and efficiently produce duty rosters and on-call rosters and optimize clinical capacity,” he added.
PROPOSAL
QGenda proposed its workforce management technology, which would include provider scheduling, on-call services, and clinic and exam room management, to address the obstacles Children’s Nebraska faced.
“In addition to keeping our patients safer through a standardized calling platform that is 100% correct 100% of the time, we now also benefit from time savings and reducing administrative burden, two of the key non-clinical benefits we wanted from this type of technology,” Dolter explains.
“Freeing up physicians’ time allowed them to practice at the top of their license and focus on seeing patients, which also had financial benefits for our organization as providers were able to see more patients and provide quality care, rather than to work on administrative tasks.
“With that in mind, we wanted to leverage workforce technology to automatically flow schedule creation and changes into our communications center and update last-minute changes automatically so schedules could be produced quickly and efficiently,” he continued.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
All of the vendor’s departments and divisions, the communications center, and anyone on the reachability landing page can view the workforce management platform. This includes healthcare providers, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, case managers, and PT and OT teams – everyone in the hospital.
The vendor’s technology integrates with Microsoft Outlook, which the organization uses, so that scheduled shifts or days off appear as appointments that everyone can see in the system.
“This is crucial.” Dolter noted. “If someone wants to reserve time with a provider, he or she will not transfer because it seems blocked and busy when in the clinical service. Furthermore, QGenda is integrated with Voalte, our secure text messaging platform, and ensures that you do not You don’t have to spend time switching back and forth between each platform, providing a user-friendly experience.”
RESULTS
Before you get one workforce management platform, Dolter had personally worked eight consecutive Halloween night shifts because there was no source of truth to track workforce trends. That’s why he and the rest of the staff at Children’s Nebraska like the new system; the technology is able to identify and correct such schedules.
“Now we no longer have to worry about having to plan the same vacation over and over again,” Dolter explains. “Additionally, one of the key benefits of the platform is visibility into historical data and insights.
“We can see who worked what shifts and at what times, so in the future we can ensure that our doctors are working an equal number of shifts and working in their area of expertise,” he continued. “That didn’t happen before this technology. But it goes a long way in terms of workplace satisfaction and work-life balance.”
Children’s Nebraska has not yet scratched the surface of leveraging the data and insights capabilities of the new system, but is looking forward to taking full advantage of the technology so the organization can: Measure how providers are moving toward contractual obligations; understand time-away trends within departments, subspecialties, locations and providers; proactively adapt to seasonal demand trends per location; and more.
“Within the next year, we will be able to report specifically on room management improvements,” Dolter said. “While we don’t have hard numbers to report on yet, we can report on improved operational efficiencies thanks to faster, automated schedule generation, and we’ve heard from our employees how satisfied they are with the technology.
“We feel that the twelve-month time frame allows us to draw reliable conclusions, but we know that integrating providers’ schedules with room management will make it easier to optimize the use of available clinic and exam rooms, thereby improving Patient access to care is improved,” he said. .
ADVICE FOR OTHERS
There are several considerations that Dolter would offer to other healthcare providers looking to deploy similar workforce management technology.
“First, I would recommend integrating it with as many other platforms as possible, including email calendars and secure messaging platforms,” he advised. “I would also make sure you allow 50% more time for setup and implementation than you think you need as schedule administrators, those on your team using this technology typically have extra time needed and support to adapt to the change and learn the workflows.
“This flows from the importance of emphasizing change management for teams,” he concluded. “While there may be some upfront work and a learning curve that comes with implementing a completely new platform, the results and payoff down the road in terms of time savings and work-life balance will be well worth it.”
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