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Physician scheduling is challenging enough for most staffing coordinators. Add in the ancillary positions like physician assistants, nurses, etc. and your emergency medicine scheduling responsibilities become exponentially more difficult. That’s why busy medical practices should consider shift scheduling software for physician assistant schedules and more. These five reasons explore the benefit for using software to manage your PA scheduling needs.
1) Helps PAs Maintain Better Work-Life Balance
Physician assistants put in long hours on the job. Erratic scheduling can make those hours feel even longer. Even worse, it can lead to unhappiness and discontent on the job and in their personal lives, which provides distractions while working.
The goal is to keep rotations in scheduled hours or days consistent enough that PAs can fit sleep and personal lives into their schedules in addition to the important work they perform. Otherwise, you may have a higher than expected turnover rate among PAs. Shift scheduling and physician assistant scheduling software can help with that.
2) Avoids Scheduled Overtime
It’s easy to get caught up in ensuring that all the shifts are covered. While juggling abundant requests for specific shifts, time off, and vacation days, it’s easy to turn to your most reliable PAs – or the ones you know best – while overlooking viable options.
This leads to some PAs having abundant overtime hours while others are barely, if doing so at all, working 40. Software can be programmed to avoid scheduled overtime hours unless conducted as a last resort or until certain scheduling options are exhausted.
3) Ensures Fair Scheduling Rotations
This is the crux of any medical facility with scheduling needs. There are always those who feel they are not getting a fair rotation. Scheduling software can be set to provide specific rotations of holidays and weekends and keep records so that when accusations arise that fair rotations are not taking place, you have documentation supporting the fairness of your rotation process.
4) Simplifies the Process for Schedule Changes
The great thing about software for physician scheduling is that it allows physicians, physicians’ assistants, and other staff members to switch, offer, and accept shift changes without administrative involvement.
Think about the number of hours that are wasted in the course of a workweek looking for people to trade shifts when life’s little emergencies arise and employees need to switch schedules. Scheduling software allows them to trade shifts online in a matter of seconds.
5) Allows Remote Access to Schedules
How many calls do you field each week due to emergency medicine scheduling questions and clarification? The software posts the schedules online (even providing instantaneous updates when changes are made) so that your PAs always have access to their schedules, even in the middle of the night without needing to place calls during office hours to find out when their next shift happens to be.
Medical facilities are rarely overstaffed. This means that everyone needs to be as efficient as possible in his or her role. Software for scheduling shifts frees up a monumental amount of time each week that can be devoted to other equally important tasks.
What could you accomplish with all that extra time on your hands each week?
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