Medical Staff Scheduling Software for Hospitals, Clinics, and Healthcare Organizations

Medical staff scheduling and nurse scheduling for medical centers, clinics, hospitals, assisted living, and long-term care facilities presents many challenges. Most of these healthcare organizations have a variety of job positions that require specific skills and different work schedules. A unit in an organization may prefer pattern scheduling where the staff commits to work a set number of shift types (day, evening, night) in a given time period while other organizations may choose preference scheduling where the staff defines individual preference for shift types.

Hospital staff scheduling software must take into account the availability of qualified personnel; nurses’ preferences for particular days, shifts, units; and regulatory and union requirements. Regulatory and union requirements govern the number of hours worked, overtime, time off between shifts, staffing ratios, certifications and credentials. Government regulations in some states mandate nurse-to-patient ratios and healthcare organizations must document, by means of staffing reports, that they are meeting, or trying to meet the ratios.

Using spreadsheets, documents, online calendars, or paper to schedule employees may be familiar. Perhaps it’s the way your organization has always done employee shift scheduling. While these methods may be sliding by, they lack the capabilities and features needed to increase efficiency, reduce labor costs, and promote employee work-life balance.

Snap Schedule Scheduling Capabilities

Snap Schedule Employee Scheduling Software helps healthcare organizations meet these challenges. It is packed with powerful employee scheduling features and gives you instant access to key decision-making criteria, including staffing requirements, regular, overtime and on-call hours, labor costs, employee skills and certifications, employee availability and preferences, and more.

Easily schedule an unlimited number of medical staff and shifts with Snap Schedule software.

• Schedule nurses and medical staff using drag & drop to easily assign shifts, mark on-call and time off, move or copy assignments.
• View assignments and schedule nurses and medical staff from three different views. Use whichever view is easiest and most effective for you. Create rolling work schedules – from days to years.
• The software supports pattern scheduling and automatically generate work schedules using industry standard shift patterns or user-definable schedule plans. Snap Schedule comes with pre-designed shift patterns for compressed work week, 8, 10, 12, and 24 hour fixed and rotating shift schedules that meet scheduling needs of most hospitals, medical centers, clinics, healthcare organizations, assisted living, and long term care facilities. Preview work schedules and make changes as necessary.

Easily fill open shifts

• Quickly find and contact qualified medical staff and nurses to fill open shifts.
• Fill schedule holes with just a few clicks of the mouse. Tell Snap Schedule software your criteria and it will show you a ranked list of available candidates to fill a shift. Ranking can be based on many criteria including job seniority, position, skills, availability, labor cost, and work hour limits.

Flexible multi-location scheduling

• Easily create work schedules for particular units or departments, the entire hospital, or an integrated delivery network.
• Define work locations (stations) for your organization and designate authorized work locations for each nurse. The Schedule Planner will alert you if any nurse is assigned to an unauthorized location.
• Know instantly where the nurses are from a single computer screen. No need to flip through pages of paper to see absentees, on-call, training, or overtime situations. View shift and rotation scheduling for any location on any date.
• Use standard reports to gain visibility into scheduling activities and cost data at all locations, groups of locations, or a specific location.

Multi-skill medical staff scheduling is a breeze

• Define skills and certifications related to each employee. Snap Schedule alerts you when credentials are about to expire or have not been updated.
• The Shift Coverage Planner lets you know if there are enough nurses with the right skills to staff a shift.
• The Staffing Overview graph displays the number of scheduled nurses with a specified skill by location, shift, or hourly coverage.

Work around your schedule constraints with ease

• Define each nurse’s availability, desired work hours, daily work hour constraints, and weekly work hour constraints.
• The Schedule Planner alerts you to availability conflicts, duplicate shift assignments, overlapped shift assignments, and conflicts with scheduled time off.
• The Daily Assignment Validation report identifies all discrepancies and constraint violations.

Manage labor costs and avoid over/under staffing

• Set overtime, shift preminum, and time off policies for your organization.
• Define hourly cost, overtime exempt status and work hour constraints for each nurse.
• Use the Shift Coverage planner to monitor under/over staffing conditions based on position, skill, and assignment reason.
• Instantly see the impact staffing changes will have on the budget.
• Adjust shift assignment start time, end time, and payable hours as necessary to reflect actual work hours.
• Standard reports provide labor cost details and summary data associated with the schedules you created over any specified period.
• Export labor cost data for payroll and accounting purposes.

Easily publish schedules to medical staff and supervisors

• Print schedule views, lists, assignment calendars, and reports to communicate schedule information to management and employees.
• Easily publish work schedules, calendars, and reports in PDF and a variety of other formats.
• Publish open shifts and shift coverage data.
• Automatically email work schedules (in text or iCalendar file format) to nurses and/or their supervisors.