What makes for great medical scheduling software?
Well-optimised staffing and scheduling decisions are paramount to management and operations teams in larger hospitals as well as smaller day clinics, physician practices and medical staffing agencies of all sizes. For these organisations, inappropriate staffing affects facility efficiency and staff morale and can severely impact the patient experience and quality of care delivered. At PARiM we can help you fix the underlying causes of problems like these with practical and immediately useful tools.
Focus on the fundamentals and a long-term partnership
Healthcare systems are incredibly complex, dynamic and are faced with considerable variability, which can have an enormous impact on performance ad productivity. On top of that, each organisation has different processes for handling their data. The variability can be produced by controllable factors such as staff training and capacity, or uncontrollable factors such as fluctuating demand for care.
The truth is, despite colourful advertising and sales, no solution at the time of this writing (November 2019) can meet the desires of all of your internal stakeholders because healthcare staff management can be an enormously convoluted and complex process. Thus you are better served by focusing on finding a reliable partner who can provide a good fit with your needs for scheduling medical staffing in terms of core features employee scheduling (including shift automation with patterns), attendance tracking as well as absence and pay management.
At PARiM we have proven our strong underlying match with companies like yours, adding dozens of real healthcare customers last quarter alone, and thus we feel confident in saying that we can drastically enhance your operations from day one. Especially so if you are still using paper-based systems or relying on Excel spreadsheets to schedule staff at a business unit (ward) level, which is then passed on to management.
PARiM instantly improves a myriad of surface-level processes: how doctors work set schedules and perform on-call duties, how nurses rotate between set shifts and administrative or reception staff are slotted in to cover clinic hours or ward duties; how you pay your staff; how you manage subcontractors and clients or partnering institutions; handle HR data and vacation requests and so forth. The result? Adopting PARiM by any healthcare organisations with more than 150 people means in 300%+ cost-savings, better operational oversight and more enjoyable work for your people.
Your upper management will enjoy a proven solution like PARiM because they may seldom have the time to question the appropriateness of staff scheduling procedures except in times of crisis or when extraordinary large bills arrive from staffing agencies. With PARiM they don't have to think twice about it as you avoid the bottlenecks that tend to form all over your organisation with less proven tools.
If this sounds intriguing, then our team can showcase our solution – simply get in touch and let's get going.
Fixing fundamentally broken operations
Anyone who has worked in the healthcare sector knows all about staff shortages. The shortage of skilled healthcare personnel globally has been documented in many studies and WHO publications – and it applies to Western countries such as the USA, the UK, Ireland, Australia and Canada who rely heavily on recruiting overseas staff.
This problem is certainly compounded by staff burnout, often fuelled by long shifts, overwork, increased workloads and lack of work-life balance, which leads to more staff leaving.
To address these issues, your management and operations are left hanging between two worlds: on the one hand, they are promised by advertising and articles in industry journals that machine learning and AI will save the day by intelligently matching staffing to demand – something that in reality is at least 3-5 years away from reaching maturity and on the other hand, there are the broken system that people have to use today – antiquated software or even worse, pen and paper.
In contrast, at PARiM we excel in providing practical and personalised solutions that work today and which you can implement from day one that dramatically reduce the pain of following issues:
Meeting the staffing demand requirement by enabling lightning-fast open shifts creation (to which people can easily apply to). Which also helps to meet staff preferences, need for work-life balance and raise staff satisfaction.
Meeting the cost reduction requirement with our unique pricing model ideal for managing a mix of flexible and full-time staff by which healthcare companies save 300% or more. Helping with budget constraints that you face.
Eliminating both under/overstaffing by making availability management easy with a couple of taps on a mobile app. Helping to avoid staff burn-out and reducing mistakes in diagnosis and operational difficulties with better planning based on real data.
According to physicians and managers that we have talked to PARiM eliminates the following issues that contribute to burnout:
Working understaffed shifts.
Inappropriate skill-mix on shifts.
Bad or non-existent overtime planning.
Undesirable shifts or rotation.
Continuous chaos due to no access to long-term planning tools.
Too frequent shift trading: cancelling or change breaks and adding new shifts.
Further considerations for forward-looking managers
Once you decide to partner with us at PARiM we pay great attention to setting up your scheduling process component by component. Even if you decide to wait before working with us, it pays to keep the following in mind:
Setting up by your organisational structure by departments, locations and areas of operation
Showing you how you can seamlessly change your planning horizon – by a single day, a single week, several weeks, month or quarter without page reloads
Staff characteristics you want to schedule by – skills, employment classification, scope of practice and individual preferences. We help you set up Saved Views of preferred staff you can select instantly.
Position coverage requirements and reporting
Working time rules requirements – minimum or maximum consecutive shift, mandatory off time after night shifts, maximum total hours allowed per time period
Workload balance and fairness – enabling better equality in distribution of shifts and time off with filters and availability management.
Weekends and holidays – periodicity of weekends or holidays off time, compensation for weekend assignments if required (ask us for early access to our next-generation Pay Manager)
Planning for mandatory vacation time and possibly sick leave time.
Planning for on-call staff and emergencies or catastrophic events
Usability of agency staff, time constraints and qualifications with subcontractor management.