Benefits of Automated Scheduling Software for Your Emergency Department

Emergency departments are faced with a dizzying number of challenges. From being short staffed to being overcrowded, the pressure on this particular medical specialty is intense. If you have the job of creating physician schedules for the emergency department, your challenges involve quality and quantity. You need to have the right doctors at the right time to treat a number of ailments, and you need to ensure that enough staff is scheduled at any one time.

Because patient arrivals vary, volumes can fluctuate from hour to hour. There can be vastly different patients with various needs arriving at any time day or night. Further, there are seasonal medical problems to take into consideration. Generally, schedules are based on average patient volume. Unfortunately, this can lead to over coverage on certain days, resulting in financial losses. Or, it can lead to under coverage, resulting in walk-out rates and heightened patient risk.

Creating a physician schedule manually drains time and manpower that emergency department cannot afford. Considering this, many departments are making the switch to automated scheduling software. As technology advances, ER automated scheduling software is proving to be the most efficient way to create working schedules that authorized staff can access anytime, day or night.

Here are some benefits of ER automated scheduling software for your emergency department.

Saves time

If your hospital is still using some mixture of e-mails, faxes, phone calls, and voicemails to combine schedules into a spreadsheet, Word document, or even a hand-written page for your on-call scheduling, you’re wasting time and money. Utilizing automated scheduling software for emergency departments saves hours of administrative time. You can easily create on-call schedules up to one year in advance and access the software from any web browser. Best of all, you can set up the software to send out email and text notifications about any schedule changes.

Improves patient care

Improving your emergency room scheduling is a commitment to both your staff and your patients. Proper emergency department scheduling ensures better care for your patients while reducing stress levels in your staff. This results in more engaged physicians and a better use of your department budget. At the end of the day, accurate call schedules and streamlined workflows make for happier physicians. This leads to more satisfied patients.

Improves employee productivity

Physicians often work long, irregular shifts. This takes a toll on their social lives and their interactions with friends and family. When you use an automated scheduling tool, it gives physicians the luxury of knowing when they are working. Further, given that schedules are available online and updated in real-time, physician frustration is reduced. This results in increased productivity, better performance, and improved staff retention.

Overall, there are several benefits of using an automated scheduling software for your emergency department. If you have any questions about automated scheduling software, MDsyncNET is here to help. We would be happy to provide you with a demo, and show you how MDsyncNET can improve the scheduling process for your emergency department.