There are several things to be considered if you manage an emergency room department, like overcrowding, patient flow fluctuations, staff shortages, and more. The emergency room is an extremely hard health department to schedule for. Not only do you have to keep in mind the needs of your nursing staff, but you must keep in mind your doctors’ preferences as well.
Emergency medicine scheduling software can help streamline the process. This specific scheduling software is designed specifically for handling the high-pressure and challenges an emergency room faces.
Below we will go over a few reasons to invest in emergency room physician scheduling software.
1. Shift scheduling software allows for an organized schedule. The ease and organizational aspect of emergency medicine scheduling software increase the morale and overall satisfaction of doctors required to utilize the schedule.
2. Eliminating errors is an important factor when looking at the overall schedule. Shift scheduling can be a difficult task and become very complex, especially when scheduling multiple departments. Physician scheduling software can simplify this process significantly.
3. An online scheduling system gives doctors the ability to make requests and check their schedules from anywhere. Because the schedule can be accessed remotely, it can be edited from anywhere ensuring availability is always up to date and all open shifts are covered.
4. Physician shift scheduling software allows for fast access to on-call doctors. Having access to on-call physicians is a crucial requirement not only for emergency departments but all other health departments as well. If a nurse needs to contact a patients’ physician to be able to provide the absolute best care plan available, delays in communication or incorrect contact information can negatively impact the patient's overall outcome. Scheduling software allows for a more direct, quick line of communication to a doctor needed for weighing in on patient care.
5. Saving money is key in keeping a hospital emergency room department running. Emergency medicine scheduling software saves hospitals and ER departments tons of money each year by reducing the number of errors that may occur through manual scheduling. Companies can easily track overtime hours being worked by staff and plan accordingly to have PRN employees or physicians cover the shift instead, thus saving thousands throughout the year.
6. Physician scheduling software significantly improves doctor burnout. There is a distinct association between patient and doctor satisfaction and patients can tell when nursing staff and doctors are unhappy and fatigued. Doctor burnout is linked to an increased staff turnover rate and low doctor satisfaction scores. Scheduling software allows doctors to eliminate burnout by physically seeing where to schedule themselves to allow adequate downtime between shifts.
7. ER departments never close, therefore shift scheduling software can easily accommodate emergency room departments' 24/7 schedules. Because emergency departments are open around the clock, it requires doctors to be staffed at all hours.
8. While emergency rooms are open 24/7, human bodies are not made for working those long hours. Scheduling software allows for an increase in shift work awareness. This allows you to see how many hours physicians have worked along with the amount of downtime in between shifts. You can adjust along the way, remotely, to fit the needs of the ER department as well as the physicians.
Overall, emergency medical scheduling software systems benefit all emergency department staffing including physicians. The ease of schedule access and request availability has been proven to boost morale among all staff members. If you are not currently using scheduling software, you should strongly consider changing over.
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