4 Reasons Why Hospital Scheduling Software is a Necessity

10 Nov, 2016 | Tags: , , , ,

4 Reasons Why Hospital Scheduling Software is a Necessity

Running a hospital is a major operation. If you are Johns Hopkins Hospital, it means dealing with over 10,000 employees, ranging from full-time nurses to part-time janitors. And that means 10,000 schedules. WhatTimeDoIWork.com aims to relieve that organizational burden by providing hospital scheduling software that is one of the most advanced on the market.

Employee scheduling software is no longer optional in the healthcare industry, but a necessity. Every patient deserves your full attention and care, which requires a full team. If that team means 200 nurses – and only 175 show up due to miscommunication – patients will be overlooked and tasks will fall through the cracks, which means mistakes may be made. And when it comes to saving lives, patients can’t afford mistakes.

4 Reason Why It is Necessary:

  1. One Click Scheduling:

Do your employees constantly call you asking for their schedules? Are you having to constantly ask them to be patient because you are still painfully laboring over writing out each shift?

Not anymore.

Instead of manually typing in each entry, WhatTimeDoIWork.com allows you to simply point and click to schedule your hospital staff. Our process is so streamlined, you will probably do a little dance in your chair out of pure excitement. If schedules change or members of your team call in sick, no more calling each one of them individually. The software will automatically notify each employee of the schedule changes, as well as allowing them 24/7 online access – No more calls asking “What Time Do I Work?”

Since hospitals run around the clock, we realize the importance of clear communication so every surgeon and surgical tech is on the same page – Ready to help patients and save lives.

  1. Conflict Free Schedules Every Time

There is no way to avoid employees requesting time-off or having varied availabilities due to second jobs, vacation time or sickness. This information can easily get lost in all of the other paperwork, so with our scheduling software, you can keep all of that information in an organized and simplified area…online. This way you have access to all schedule requests at anytime.

In the past, you would have to check your request books and calendars to know when you can schedule each staff member, but our program automatically sends conflict alerts while you are scheduling your employees so you don’t make a mistake.

Employees simply submit their requests online so it is displayed on their schedule instead of a scrap piece of paper. If you think this will make your life easier, your staff will be thankful too! Employees also receive automatic reminders about their shifts, so you can eliminate no shows.

When your whole team shows up, more patients can be seen, which means less time in the waiting room and higher patient satisfaction.

  1. Accessible Employee Contact Information

We keep your employee’s contact information in an organized online folder so when you need to contact 50 staff members, you can save yourself the time of searching down a contact list to find their numbers. You just type in their name and voilà.

An even larger undertaking is contacting your entire staff about weather conditions or a large catastrophe that will affect the ER that day. Good news. You have the option to simultaneously call every person in your contact list in seconds with one click. You can also send out mass emails and/or text messages to selected employees or your entire staff.

  1. Save More Money

You might be thinking…How does paying for a new program save me money? Well, it’s simple. Our software automatically calculates labor costs daily and/or weekly while you create your staff schedule so you can more accurately budget for the year.

It also saves you countless scheduling hours throughout your week, so you can devote more time to urgent tasks. You can even save, copy and reuse previous employee schedules if there is no need for changes. WhatTimeDoIWork.com caters the platform to fit your exact needs, so we work with your hospital team to make sure the site is as easy to use as possible for your employees.

If your hospital is in need of a scheduling software, sign up for a FREE trial today. Once you see the ease of the software, you won’t go back.

We provide pay-as-you-go pricing and require NO service contracts or additional fees. The software updates automatically and comes with a free program wizard to walk you through the learning curve. Help us help you give your patients the treatment they deserve by signing up for a 30 Day Free Trial today – No credit card needed!


Top Scheduling Resources for Hospitals, Clinics, and Healthcare Organizations

21 Oct, 2016 | Tags: , ,

Top Scheduling Resources for Hospitals, Clinics, and Healthcare Organizations

Every month, thousands of hospital administrators and staff personnel use a wide variety of software resources to deal with the challenges of scheduling people. These software comes with an easy to use interface that automatically generate hospital schedules using user-definable schedule plans. So if you are looking for the best resource to help you schedule people, look no further. In this post, we have provided a comprehensive list of resources for hospital administrators. Read on to find out more about these resources.   If you are looking to schedule employees then we have you covered.

Reservio

Reservio is one of the best online booking and scheduling software. One thing about this software is that it has been optimized for a wide range of business categories. It helps hospital administrators accept booking 24 days seven days a week, organize scheduling and share useful information about the hospital and its clients. It is a free to try software not only for healthcare facilities but also education, sport or personal care entities.

Veribook

Veribook is a great tool used for the purpose of online appointment and scheduling. It displays the real time that a hospital is available to accept and manage appointments. The software comes with simple to use interface and a wide selection of features to help an organization save administrative time and money. The software is the face of future customer service as far as appointment and scheduling is concerned.

A.I.med

AImed is a robust, well built and easy to use scheduling system. It has the ability to schedule and manage both single and multiple appointments simultaneously. Users can use it to balance alerts, collect payment at check-in/out, to send messages and to put some people on the waitlist. It comes with multiple office support and an optional patient reminder system.

Voicent’s AutoReminder

Voicent’s AutoReminder is one of the best appointment reminder software available. This tool features an automated appointment scheduling and client reminder system. Users can use this feature to send personalized messages to any mobile phone device. When a reminder call is made, the software allows the recipient to reschedule the appointment, confirm it or leave a personal message by simply pressing a number on their mobile devices.

TimeTrade

TimeTrade is a web-based appointment scheduling software. This tool is designed in that it can be deployed for customer self-service scheduling through voice or internet response systems, central scheduling through agents of call center agents or simply for internal use. This web-based tool is ideal for both large and small organizations in a wide range of fields from healthcare to financial services.

Yocale

Yocale is an excellent software that provides hospital administrators with convenient and reliable scheduling, marketing, patient management and reporting. The software also comes with full-service tools that can fit into any business and help it grow. Yocale is ideal for any Individual or service providing business that accepts appointments.

Ultra Charts

Ultra Charts was designed over 30 years ago to improve organization’s efficiency and revenue stream. This software is a fully integrated, easier to use and a completely certified system that that comes with built-in customization options. The software’s system includes can be used for appointment scheduling, billing, as a Patient Portal and to display electronic medical records.

Eclipse

Eclipse is one of the Practice Management Software that has been in use across the word for over 20 years. The software can be used for scheduling, billing, an extensive alerts system, EHR (electronic health record), certified HIPAA compliant electronic claims, daily notes, and remittance. Some of its unique features include a patient data access tracking system to help hospital administrators run myriad reports.

ScheduleHopper

ScheduleHopper can be used to manage client information and scheduling all in one place. This tool safes time organizing client information and scheduling meeting. If you are a hospital administrator or staff personnel who regularly schedule appointment with your patients and want something clean, convenient and reliable, then ScheduleHopper is a good software for you.

Appointment Scheduler

Just like ScheduleHopper, Appointment Scheduler is another excellent scheduling software available in the market. This tool features a very easy to use, fully customizable and extremely fast appointment scheduling system. Users who use this software get access to an outstanding level of support. It has the ability to schedule and manage both single and multiple appointments simultaneously


Scheduling Tips for Hospital Administrators

06 Sep, 2016 | Tags: ,

Technology advances, new healthcare regulations and an aging population have all created a booming market for healthcare administrators. They are responsible for the oversight of medical facilities that range from large hospitals to nursing homes and rehabilitation centers. Hospital administrators coordinate care, manage finances, create schedules, and work with medical staff. A profession as a hospital administrator is fascinating and rewarding – each day brings new and exciting tasks and challenges.

The impact of scheduling on hospital administrators’ lives remains a big issue. Many cite balancing work hours and personal life as problematic, and others are concerned about their daily workloads. Some have cited that expectations and demands on them were increasing, while others cited scheduling per se as challenging. As a healthcare facility manager or hospital administrator, it’s imperative that you’ve a powerful plan in place in order to manage your critical staffing needs effectively throughout peak and off-peak hours. With that goal in mind, we have compiled the following scheduling tips for hospital administrators to help them manage their healthcare staffing needs around the clock.

Scheduling And Managing Rapid Needs

Developing and implementing a comprehensive staffing and scheduling procedure is a crucial element of any patient-care and staffing plan. It is necessary to partner with a healthcare staffing agency that is able to fulfil all of your supplemental staffing requirements at a moment’s notice with fully-certified, highly qualified professionals for you provide and maintain the high quality around the clock care’ and personalized attention your patients deserve.

Advance Planning

The best approach to unplanned staffing deficits would be to proactively define the action steps that need to be taken prior to the crisis. Besides helping you manage your short notice or emergency staffing needs, it’s also critical that you partner with a Joint Commission-certified healthcare staffing firm which can help you plan ahead for busy periods like holidays and vacation seasons wherein your regular staff may request concurrent time off. By planning your staffing requirements in advance, you make sure that your facility won’t be caught short handed during these critical times.

Workload Management

You will be better prepared to ensure the precise distribution of staff and resources by analyzing your staffing needs and assessing current and projected workloads. This decisive workload analysis allows you to effectively avoid procedural errors which result whenever staff members are overloaded.

Answering Calls and Managing Calendars

Calling patients, shifting appointments and rescheduling events around at a moment’s notice is a core part of the work. This is another really important part of the work of a hospital administrator. People who call medical offices typically talk to the administrator, at least at first, especially for things like scheduling an appointment or getting directions to the office. The job also usually requires lots of savvy when it comes to organizing and scheduling time. The administrator can create and manage calendars for appointments, patient consultations, and important meetings which they must keep constantly updated.

Clerical Work

The medical world is one which is heavily records-dependent. One of the hospital administrator’s biggest jobs is keeping paperwork and written files in order. Typically, this starts with patient records. Usually, the administrator can devise a system to keep files updated and accessible, which oftentimes involves computing and electronic record keeping. Most modern healthcare offices use a combination of paper and digital-based files, and organizing and assimilating these two can be a bigger undertaking than it seems.

Ensuring Compliance

The healthcare industry is regulated by numerous rules and regulations. It is the job of the hospital administrator to help with or manage the process of making sure an organization remains compliant. This might involve keeping up with the latest healthcare news relevant to the locality and type of organization.

Accept Holidays as Part of the Schedule

For many hospital administrators, working a holiday one year would mean they get the next year off. Barnes, however, will work on Christmas for the next six years straight. You can work a schedule of 7 nights on and 7 nights off which means you might not have to work on the upcoming string of holidays.

Healthcare and hospital facility management is always needed to maintain a clean, healthy environment. It’s important for medical facilities to make sure service requests are responded to swiftly and efficiently and that preventive maintenance schedules are set up so as to maintain operations without interruption.


Top Challenges Hotel Managers Face

30 Aug, 2016 | Tags: , , , ,

Running a hotel is one of the most difficult jobs yet one of the most rewarding in these times. Loaded with a variety of responsibilities, a hotel manager is supposed to look after the entire management staff. Hotel managers need to have a friendly personality, excellent organizational and time management skills to manage numerous responsibilities, such as, financial management to commercial accountability for budgeting, organizing, planning and directing all hotel services.

Managerial duties of a hotel manager include the following:

⦁ planning and organising catering, accommodation other hotel services on a daily basis
⦁ promoting and marketing the hotel business;
⦁ managing budgets and creating financial plans
⦁ controlling overall expenditure;
⦁ maintaining financial and statistical records;
⦁ carrying out detailed inspections of services and property
⦁ achieving monthly sales and profit targets;
⦁ proposing and analysing revenue management strategies;
⦁ training, recruiting and monitoring staff;
⦁ planning work schedules for individuals and teams;
⦁ greeting and meeting customers;
⦁ dealing regularly with customer and client complaints and comments;
⦁ ensuring smooth running of events and conferences;
⦁ supervising maintenance, supplies, renovations and furnishings;
⦁ dealing regularly with suppliers and contractors
⦁ ensuring effective security;
⦁ ensuring full compliance with licensing health and safety, law and other statutory regulations

Running and managing a hotel is a grueling task. There are three types of people that a hotel manager must please at all time, and they are the guests arriving at the hotel, employees / staff, and hotel’s corporate management. A hotel manager is expected to face up to his responsibilities and challenges with those people and simultaneously keep the hotel afloat.

Hotel managers usually have a tough and an unpredictable schedule. If a customer is facing an issue with such as a toilet overflow or a power outage in the room. hotel manager is summoned, since he is the man who is in charge and responsible for smooth functioning of the hotel. Below are some of the challenges that hotel managers have to confront on a regular basis:

1. Operational Challenges: A hotel manager has to ensure that the housekeeping is up to date on all the floors and room occupancy details, bookkeeping are all updated timely. He is also responsible for ensuring that the staff is well trained to handle and manage all kinds of customers and clients.

2. Technical Challenges: A hotel manager is responsible for creating occupancy reports and forecasts and also managing overbooking. He is also responsible for fixing the right price for all kinds of rooms at the hotel. He is supposed to look after the overall expenditures at the hotel.

3. Security Challenges: Hotel manager is responsible for maintaining optimal safety and security at the hotel. Having a proper surveillance system throughout the hotel property as well as automatic door-locking system in the hotel rooms that can immediately change codes when a customer or guest loses a door key are some of the measures the hotel manager must take to ensure proper security for guests.

4. Revenue Challenges: In this digital age of internet bookings, room prices vary from one website or hotel to another. It has been noted that hotel managers who carry on with fixed rates tend to miss out on opportunities that can bring them huge profits if they raise prices during holiday and peak seasons, and subsequently lowering the rates during off-peak season to encourage occupancy. Hotel managers must experiment with pricing in order to ensure and maintain a steady flow of guests as well as revenue.

5. Leadership Challenges: Hotel managers face leadership challenges in the form of industry corporatization. In this era, company structures are rapidly changing and growing more complex, which makes it difficult to ensure consistency in customer service.

A hotel manager must create and maintain team unity, establish open communication policies and make an effective information management system that can help in smooth functioning of the hotel.

6. Amenity Challenges: Hotels now provide amenities such as a coffeemaker, TV and radio as essentials in guest rooms, but not so long ago, they were considered luxury items for a hotel room. It has been noted that vacant rooms consume electricity with an average of 12 hours a day and the cooling and heating in the room costs takes up half of a hotel’s operating costs. A hotel manager is faced with increasing costs which he must encounter by devising strategies to make amenity-usage sustainable.

7. Cost Challenges: A hotel manager has to look after the increases in renovation and construction costs that often result in escalating capital reinvestment and increased capital requirements for new construction which takes time. Many clients and companies demand improvements and upgrades in the hotel’s physical condition and press for more stringent adherence to world class standards for the hotel to compete with the international hotels worldwide, which often result in escalating capital reinvestment that a hotel manager must deal with.

8. Technological Challenges: Due to the advancement in technology, hotels worldwide are adopting digital interfaces and integrating all of their workflow onto information systems, that are dramatically easier than conventional workflow systems. Many hotel managers today are taking full advantage of the new technology and streamlining their operations. This upgrade requires significant investment but there are unlimited benefits of using a dedicated information system. It also requires proper training and understanding of the interface. Most current information systems installed at various hotels have been found to be under-utilized, the main reason is hospitality industry’s reluctance to invest in refresher courses and training of their staff. To fully benefit from digital technology, hotel managers must support integration and adoption of new technology that can help streamline the workflow.

9. Customer Expectations: Hotel manager is also responsible for addressing and satisfying the ever evolving needs of his customer needs to fulfill which is his main priority. In this day and age, customers are increasingly aware and sophisticated in their use of technology and expect the same from the hotel they are staying in. Technology gives hotels an opportunity to reach out to their customers effectively and efficiently.

Hotel managers can successfully manage a hotel if they learn to confront these numerous challenges with determination and their brilliant management skills.


Hospital Worker Schedule Information

23 Aug, 2016 | Tags: , ,

Things You Didn’t Know about a Hospital Worker’s Schedule

For both clinical and non-clinical hospital workers, a typical schedule can be anything but regular. Because hospitals see an ongoing and frequent turnover of patients whose needs are always changing, it is quite the challenge to make sure the facility is properly staffed at all times.

Most people know that doctors and nurses work long and varied hours, but the general public may not realize just what is involved in the typical schedule of a hospital employee. For instance, did you know that many hospital employees build time into their day not only for travel, but for parking as well? Very few hospitals have designated parking just for employees (doctors excluded), so workers have to either compete for spaces with visitors in a parking garage or possibly park a distance away from the building itself.

Here is a list of hospital workers’ challenges and how our hospital employee scheduling software can help overcome these obstacles.

Many, if not most, work longer than their scheduled shifts. Much of what is involved in the job needs to get done, whether it takes 10 hours or 12 hours. It simply cannot be put off until the next shift. Furthermore, this may or may not count as overtime depending on the job and the hospital itself. Adding up all that extra time put in over the course of a week, month, or year really demonstrates just how difficult hospital work can be. One of the most useful features of What Time Do I Work software is that employers can set up automatic alerts to notify them of any overtime. This can help manage employee hours and control payroll budgets.

They work potentially inconsistent and/or overnight hours. This applies mostly to clinical employees, especially doctors and nurses. For example, obstetricians can be called in any time for a delivery, emergency room staff can suddenly find themselves working extra shifts or called in during the night to assist with an influx of victims of a multi-vehicle accident, or simply working unexpectedly to cover for a colleague’s sick day. The reasons for inconsistent hours are virtually endless, but our software is up to the task of handling this problem in a user-friendly way. Easily create on-call schedules and also view past hospital schedules that are logged into the system for help with staffing future shifts. This will help prevent understaffing situations and will make the most of employees’ availability and skill sets for overall staffing needs.

If time off is needed, it is up to the employee to switch shifts with a coworker. It is really not feasible for a department to be short one or several employees on any given shift, so if an employee needs time off for any reason when he or she is originally scheduled to work, that person is responsible for finding coverage. This can be difficult, especially if the employee does not have contact with everyone in the department. This difficulty is increased if the employee needs multiple shifts covered. With our software, employees can view schedules anytime and swap shifts with colleagues within the program. This makes for possible and effective communication within departments without having to involve management in shift changes.

For many hospital workers, especially nurses, there is no typical schedule. Shifts rotate, they are not permanent (day/night rotation), and employees must rotate holidays and weekends depending on the hospital. This type of work can be an added burden on an already stressful job. Imagine if an employee has to take an unplanned sick day because his or her child needs to stay home from school due to illness. Needing to find coverage in a pinch can be challenging and stressful. This comes with the job, but effective scheduling software can make it much easier to handle. This constantly changing work environment requires a proactive scheduling system, one in which employers can easily access employees’ contact information, communicate posted schedules, and organize time-off requests. WhatTimeDoIWork software does all this and more; it is even sufficient for large hospitals who need to manage staff with different availabilities.

Only someone who has worked in a hospital can truly understand the pros and cons of doing so, especially when it comes to a typical schedule. Our software is user-friendly and can meet all the challenges that hospital workers and employers face on a daily basis. I

t can be nearly impossible to anticipate all the obstacles that are part of managing a hospital staff, but WhatTimeDoIWork takes the guesswork out of the equation.