How to Ensure Quality Care for Your Clients & Patients: Healthcare Automation at a New Level

Published: 26-01-2024

Have you got special medical scheduling software in your healthcare business? Automation is a must even in such a socially-oriented industry. When you want to enhance the efficiency of your healthcare institution, you need more than high-end diagnostics and medical equipment. Software products for healthcare management are also worth your attention. Let’s discover on the example of Shifton scheduling software for healthcare, how your workflow can upscale to a new level of efficiency and client-friendliness.

Ensuring quality care for your clients and patients is at the healthcare industry’s core. 

Beyond medical expertise, this requires the right tools and strategies to empower your care team, enhance communication, streamline operations, and keep everyone well-informed. Of course, you can pick a couple of tools to provide all these functions, yet the better idea is to select a single tool which embodies them impeccably. 

What are the challenges the organization of the work process in the healthcare industry faces?

Each healthcare establishment from a beauty parlor to a medical center needs to work as an organism with all its parts working in synergy. This can be provided by the expertise and efforts of your staff and by top-notch automation tools which help regulate and manage the whole workflow.

In terms of the healthcare industry, the most significant processes should be maintained to keep the highest level of customer service.

What the industry needs is flexible and affordable medical staff scheduling software that is guaranteed to simplify the scheduling process and communication of healthcare professionals. Medical scheduling software by Shifton provides solutions for all these requests.

What is healthcare staff scheduling software?

Medical staff scheduling software automates and optimizes the scheduling process for creating and maintaining employee schedules for healthcare employees. Besides this, advanced types of scheduling software for healthcare provide business owners and healthcare managers with more functions which ease the operation of the establishment and offer its customers exceptional levels of service. These functions and features help form an environment for overall operation which is:

Key Features of Medical Staff Scheduling Software

Let’s consider which features help healthcare scheduling software like Shifton to keep the palm in the market and remain highly appreciated by healthcare managers, employees, and patients.

Customization

A flexible scheduling solution takes on all related complexities that nurses face when optimizing the workforce. You don’t want scheduling software that can just scale, but also can tolerate all scheduling-related preferences, rotations, and last-minute updates. The flexibility of scheduling helps to avoid overlays and mistakes in shift formation, and it shows your employees that you are interested in their engagement and you appreciate their time and their needs. Even in emergent cases, when additional staff is urgently required, you can offer free nurses to join the shift. In the same way, you can manage shifts if one of your personnel is sick or needs an unplanned day off.

Available on mobile

Being a healthcare professional naturally means you’re mobile and on your feet all the time. A healthcare staff scheduling software that is only accessible by desktop or is an in-house logging system, just won’t be efficient. Instead, Shifton offers mobile access for managers and healthcare staff to get in touch instantly and receive instant notifications about some changes, assessments, regular routines, etc.

Mobile functionality is a better way to engage a distributed workforce and improve communications, making it a crucial feature that can empower your staff. Solutions must be easily accessible and encrypted on all personal laptops and smartphones while allowing healthcare professionals the ability to easily make requests, receive notifications, and communicate with one another. In terms of medical specifics, it is more than just convenient, it is crucial.

Admin oversight

While medical staff scheduling software does reduce the need for managerial oversight, the software also equips managers with an extra set of eyes. Some scheduling software solutions require managerial permission settings for employees to freely insert their scheduling preferences, while some still provide oversight through approval processes. A nurse schedule app is your additional management tool in this way which helps to calculate working hours for each nurse, account for overworking, and disperse the load according to professional skills, experience, and current amount of working hours for each team member.

Employee monitoring

As we said, all medical staff scheduling software monitors employee activity in some form. Even basic scheduling solutions can track and store an employee’s days off, paid time off, and overtime. More advanced scheduling software solutions analyze those same metrics to add more context for HR departments to help identify trends and other insights. Some even take factors such as hours worked, overtime, sick leave, and PTO, and automatically send them directly to payroll, free from any errors. Namely, Shifton offers these opportunities and provides you with instant monitoring and control tools like shift reports, checklists, to-do lists and assignments.

Payroll Automation

Effective management in the healthcare industry includes timely payroll accounting. In case when you do it manually, the risk of mistakes or forgotten shifts increases. No need to say that it takes lots of your effective working time. With healthcare scheduling software in your hand, payroll is an easy-peasy thing. The software distributes working hours according to shifts and employee load, calculates the salary, and even adds bonuses and penalties according to a preset algorithm which you can adjust to your accounting rules.

Planning Schedules for Patients

Planning working shifts for doctors and nurses is only a part of the process. You need to plan your patients’ visits as well. Making the appointment schedule in the same environment of your healthcare staff management software is beneficial and trouble-free. Shifton works as your patient scheduler software along with being a staff management software product.

Benefits of Using Healthcare Staff Scheduling Software

In terms of management routines in a medical center or a hospital, the benefits of healthcare scheduling software are considerably important.

Optimization and automation of staff scheduling

Automation significantly helps to simplify tasks like tracking compliance and monitoring overtime and absences. Additionally, both managers and staff avoid the hassle of creating shift assignments, reducing unwanted overtime, lowering the possibility of no-shows, and receiving full visibility into their teams’ schedules and conflicts. Overall, this provides a better staff experience and improves retention which will translate into better care.

Improved communication

Poor communication leads to many serious problems such as employees quitting, bad customer service, mistakes and misunderstandings. Two of the top five reasons employees are unhappy at their job are due to communication issues. Using the Shifton scheduling app with built-in communication features makes it much easier for managers and employees to stay on the same page by sharing updates and filling open shifts quickly. Additionally, the work chat feature provides a safe and secure space for peers to communicate professional information and instant troubleshooting.

Higher employee engagement and morale

When you have a schedule that works for all your employees and services the needs of your patients, then the entire team can feel valued, satisfied, and engaged. Whereas a discouraged employee may easily skip a shift just because it doesn’t fit their work-life balance. When you provide your employees with momentary feedback, cheer them for good work, and provide rewards for their loyalty and efforts, they get the highest motivation.

Easily create a schedule that works for everyone

In a single click, you can quickly add shifts and publish them to all your employees. Create single, multiple, or team shifts, and upload shift bulks with an Excel file. Plus, with the calendar view, drag & drop options, and ability to copy last week’s shifts, you save a ton of time on creating and organizing, allowing you to focus on the big picture.

Customized environment

With Shifton, you can create custom fields on an employee’s user profile as a smart way to identify and group your workforce. Add more relevant information to a profile so that when creating a schedule, you can filter by custom fields to ensure the right employees are added to a specific job.

In fact, you can qualify people for jobs by their professional experience (which you add to their user details) and make sure that only qualified employees are assigned to each job/shift. As your business has unique features, you can adapt your healthcare scheduling software to meet your specifics.

Shift tasks

Set shift-related tasks and oversee their execution for each employee. This can be embodied in nurses’ plans, reports execution from doctors and medical advisors, your administrator’s tasks, etc. You’ll have full clarity on the progress of tasks you set, and you will be notified when tasks are completed, so you can boost your operational efficiency and raise your team’s execution standards.

The efficient work of a healthcare establishment is based on its staff’s professionalism and acute performance of all the tasks. With Shifton, you can enforce your team with a top-notch automated tool and get the best reviews from your patients for your impeccable customer service.