Many hospitals believe it or not still use a manual paper-based method to create, manage and use on-call schedules that follow doctors and nurses that are on-call for a particular shift. Many of these schedules are assembled by departments and sent to call center or switchboard operators that assemble all of the schedules during the overnight shift. We have worked with hospitals that had over 150 on-call schedules that had to be collated, assembled and bound in folders for the following day. To say that is inefficient is an understatement.
There are two major problems with a paper based on-call scheduling system. First is that as soon as its printed and bound, a change will be made rendering it out of date with incorrect information, meaning all of the distributed binders need to be updated by hand. The second problem is that the information only lives at the location of the binder. If a physician or nurse wants to know their schedule they need to call someone that has a binder or physically email have the information to each person. Both of these problems lead to inefficiency and waste.
By automating your on call scheduling system you solve both of these problems as well as gain functionality that you would never get with a paper based on call scheduling system. Automating your on-call schedules and creating web access you allow departments to create and update their own on-call schedules, allow physicians and nurses to view their schedules virtually anywhere in the world. Also, you can take advantage of the electronic format which allows paging, calling, emailing, and viewing of on-call schedules from any web-enabled device.
Our customers have helped us fine-tune our automated on call scheduling package. We have developed dozens of new features since rolling out this product over ten years ago. These features are now a vital part of the daily communications in hundreds of hospitals that use the Intelligent Series on-call scheduling package. Automated on-call scheduling packages have developed over time and are robust with features and most can handle even the most difficult, unique and detailed on-call schedules.
Matt Everly is the marketing director for Amtelco’s 1Call healthcare division and can be reached at maeverly@1call.com
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