Scheduling for Academic Hospitals

Tracking shifts, managing resident time constraints, balancing program requirements, and pairing residents with attendings isn’t easy when an Excel sheet and sticky notes are the only tools in your basket. But, the scheduling process for academic hospital programs doesn’t have to be so cumbersome and time-consuming.

Optimized scheduling solutions for academic hospitals equip schedulers with a tool to help them align GME requirements and provider requests. These solutions can also provide insights into how to better manage resources, reporting, and expand accessibility across the entire hospital, clinic, or department.

Provider Scheduling Difficulties in Academic Settings

Balancing Clinical Care, Education, Demand, and Research

Provider schedules must be able to balance individual departments’ scheduling requirements, organizational standards, provider preferences, and patient demand. Academic healthcare organizations require schedules that can serve as an anchor to operations, factoring in:

• The unique needs of individual departments
• The organization’s overall goals and objectives
• Individual provider scheduling preferences
• Patient demand for certain care services
• Clinical, teaching, and research responsibilities
• Training requirements for residents across specialties

Scheduler Workload

The responsibility of orchestrating academic schedules falls to schedulers, who may spend hundreds of hours annually turning the above laundry list of requirements into provider schedules—often manually, or with little to no automation. Schedulers work hard building on-call lists, calendars, and schedules that meet the needs of their organization, but it’s a tall task. As the hospitalist team at UNC Health (an academic medical center) grew, their scheduler felt that manually scheduling the department’s providers had become nearly impossible.

“The difficulty was, we grew very rapidly. It got to where I was spending so many hours creating the schedule, and it had just gotten so complex that it almost became impossible to create. We have to take into consideration providers’ preferences, the many different services that we have. We also have particular services that only some of our providers can cover, such as the procedure service. There are so many different factors that come into play that have to be considered.”

– Administrative Coordinator, Hospitalist Division, UNC Health

Fortunately, UNC Health managed to streamline the scheduling process with Lightning Bolt Scheduling.

Benefits of Optimized Scheduling Software for Academic Hospitals

Cost Savings

Academic medical centers and teaching hospitals play an essential role in the overall health system, but the expanded scope of teaching, research, and patient care means academic hospitals routinely face higher patient care costs than non-teaching hospitals.

Average Inpatient Hospital Cost Per Case¹

In such a competitive financial environment, academic healthcare organizations need a more efficient way to manage resources to ensure they can perform their critical social mission. Because labor costs are at an all-time high—likely accounting for up to 60% of hospital operating budgets²—clinical staffing is one of the most critical areas to monitor when it comes to resource management and utilization. Unfortunately, this is also a difficult task.

Time Savings

An advanced scheduling solution can be instrumental in saving schedulers time as well as creating more effective and efficient schedules. By building out rules that dictate a department’s schedules, schedulers can auto-generate provider schedules and share them globally across their organization to increase schedule visibility and give time back to supporting clinical teams.

“It has allowed me time to do other work besides just scheduling. Scheduling is only a part of what I do.”

– Administrative Coordinator, Hospitalist Division, UNC Health

Uncertain how to find a scheduling platform that meets your organization’s needs? Download our Choosing an Enterprise Scheduling Solution guide for a detailed discussion of how rules-based scheduling works and the capabilities you should expect from a scheduling solution.

Accessibility and Reporting

Automated, rule-based software like Lightning Bolt Scheduling gives a more detailed view into the shift schedule than ever before. Academic scheduling software allows for detailed reports, including:

• Measured clinical hours for inpatient and outpatient
• Tracking of required conferences and training
• Pairing residents and attending physicians accurately

Automated scheduling grants better schedule accessibility across the entire health system, hospital, or individual department. This is done by having:

• One accessible link for the real-time schedule across hospitals, clinics, and individual departments
• Visible dynamic updates across all departments and locations
• Everything centrally located in the Lightning Bolt application

Resource Utilization

In addition to generating significant time savings, an advanced provider scheduling system can also help healthcare organizations better manage their most important resource: clinical staff. Here are four ways an optimized scheduling solution can eliminate excess, cut costs, and increase revenue:

1. Build schedules that take provider productivity into consideration
2. Align provider supply and patient demand to identify and optimize missed revenue opportunities
3. Access analytics across shifts, departments, and locations to guide decision-making
4. Reduce turnover by ensuring shift equity with schedule transparency and provider autonomy over their schedules

Optimizing Your Academic Schedule Process

Optimize the scheduling process at your academic medical center or hospital with rule-based scheduling software. To learn what Lightning Bolt can do for your hospital’s academic program, connect with us below.

Resources:

1. Estimating the Mission-Related Costs of Teaching Hospitals, Project HOPE, Lane Koenig, Allen Dobson, Silver Ho, Jonathan M. Siegel, David Blumenthal, and Joel S. Weissman, Health Affairs—Vol. 22, No. 6—Pages 112-122, November 2003: psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/duty-hours-and-patient-safety
2. Labor Management Trends, Healthcare Financial Management Association, Navigant, Aug. 2018: guidehouse.com/-/media/www/site/insights/healthcare/2018/navigant-hfma-2018-labor-pulse-survey.pdf

The post Building More Efficient Schedules for Academic Hospitals appeared first on Lightning Bolt Solutions.

So, how can academic healthcare organizations meet ACGME’s regulations and reduce burnout while maintaining exceptional patient experiences? While addressing hours worked was a great place to start, almost two decades later, more can be done to enhance speed to care while giving residents more freedom and flexibility with their schedules. That’s where modern technology steps in to take care of crucial elements—such as schedule creation—to allow residents to focus on what they want to do most: learn how to save lives.

Because residents have so much on their plate, balancing shifts is essential to fighting burnout. We’ll look at five ways better scheduling improves resident satisfaction:

1. Ensuring Shift Equity and Sustainable Work Hours
2. Increasing Schedule Transparency and Visibility
3. Simplifying Shift Swapping and Time-Off Requests
4. Sharing the Schedule in a Timely Fashion
5. Helping Administrators Better Support Clinical Staff

Ensuring Shift Equity and Sustainable Work Hours

Setting scheduling rules that limit weekly work hours to ensure fair shift distribution should be a top priority. In academic medicine, meeting the 80-hour work week guidelines is even more difficult than it seems. A multitude of scheduling factors—including physicians’ teaching requirements, research duties, and clinical responsibilities—must be considered. As a result, it can be difficult to manually prioritize work limits and shift equity with other scheduling rules.

An advanced scheduling solution can easily accommodate complex scheduling variables once rules are set to limit work hours and balance providers’ varying responsibilities. What’s more, the system should also have the ability to factor in providers’ preferences and ensure that certain shifts, like weekends, nights, and on-calls, are distributed among providers as evenly as possible.

Though this sounds complex, it’s an essential part of balancing a resident’s schedule and, in turn, fighting burnout. The right provider scheduling solution will simplify this process and help improve outcomes for academic healthcare organizations.

Increasing Schedule Transparency and Visibility

When you have a solution that centralizes real-time schedules in a single location, you increase schedule visibility and transparency. Creating schedules is one thing, but ensuring providers can access the latest schedule is another issue. Locating an up-to-date schedule can be a huge source of frustration for providers, and it can also have a big impact on patient care. An advanced scheduling solution makes the latest schedules from across your organization accessible to providers at any time from any device in any location.

The ability to easily view schedules across devices cuts down on frustration by making it simpler to find and contact the on-call provider and communicate with colleagues. It also increases visibility into the schedule creation process. For example, if a resident goes on their mobile app to request Friday off and sees that two other team members have already requested that day off, it may be less surprising if the request is denied. The reporting capabilities available in the scheduling platform should also promote transparency by allowing schedulers to share reports around shift equity, approval of time-off requests, and more.

Simplifying Shift Swapping and Time-Off Requests

When residents want to swap shifts or request time off, the process should not be arduous or overly complex. Just as transparency in other users’ schedules eases frustration, the ability to ask for schedule changes easily enhances the provider experience.

The lack of a simple, standardized process for shift swapping and time-off requests can make it unnecessarily challenging to find the right person to take over a shift when needed. It can also lead residents to swap shifts without letting the proper administrators know, resulting in outdated, inaccurate schedules that delay communication and patient care.

Centralizing time-off requests, shift swapping, and other scheduling requests on a single digital scheduling platform puts the schedule back into the provider’s hands, giving them more autonomy and control over how and when they are scheduled without leaving administrators in the dark.

Sharing the Schedule in a Timely Fashion

Time is one of the most important factors in a physician’s day-to-day job, and knowing what’s coming today, tomorrow, and even next month will help residents be as prepared as possible. This is why schedules should be widely and easily accessible, and auto-generated, real-time updates can enhance that process even more with the right scheduling solution.

Creating schedules can also be incredibly time consuming, especially in academic settings. Schedulers often try to balance teaching, research, and patient care with organizational, departmental, and individual provider needs. Resulting time constraints mean that providers often receive their schedules at the last minute, making work-life balance nearly impossible. But next month’s schedule shouldn’t have to wait until next month!

An advanced scheduling solution can simplify schedule creation with rules built to meet each team’s unique needs. Different departments within an organization can then auto-generate gap-free schedules built to their specifications, which helps administrators complete and distribute schedules much more quickly. Complete schedules should be instantly available for care team members and administrators across the organization to access at any time.

Helping Administrators Better Support Clinical Staff

It is essential to free up administrators’ time so they can better support the needs of clinical staff. Roughly 312 hours are spent creating and managing schedules annually per department, and for academic facilities with more complex schedules, the number is likely far higher.³ That’s valuable time administrators (and sometimes providers) could spend finding ways to more effectively support clinical staff.

Loretta Weeks, the Administrative Coordinator for the Division of Hospital Medicine for UNC Hospitals, said PerfectServe’s Lightning Bolt Scheduling solution has helped the hospitalist group balance both in-patient and teaching services.

Balancing workloads is essential to fighting the growing challenges of burnout that impact a resident’s work-life balance. The right scheduling solution will create fair and equitable schedules that are transparent, simple to edit, easy to share, and follow ACGME’s guidelines for recommended worked hours.

Lightning Bolt offers optimized schedule creation with the ability to add provider preferences, see shift-swapping opportunities, view real-time changes, and share the most up-to-date and accurate schedule possible. Learn more about Lightning Bolt’s capabilities here.

^1,2 Duty Hours and Patient Safety, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Patient Safety Network, Sept. 7, 2019: psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/duty-hours-and-patient-safety

³ The Real Cost of On-Call Scheduling Guide, PerfectServe, 2022:https://lightning-bolt.com/download/hospital-on-call-scheduling/

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