Shift Scheduling Software for Nurses & Medical Staff

Nurse scheduling and rostering for medical centers, clinics, and hospitals presents many challenges. Determining a work schedule for nurses that is fair and efficient is not trivial. Scheduling software for nurses can help solve this complex problem and assist nurse managers in staffing shifts and departments more efficiently than manual, paper-based scheduling processes of the past.

Making sure that each shift is properly staffed is one of the hardest challenges that nurse managers face. To properly care for patients and to maintain the required nurse staffing plans and rations, each shift must be covered by the right number of nurses with the right combination of skills. Staffing must take into account 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 shift scheduling for nurses and medical staff. 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 staff scheduling software helps healthcare organizations meet these challenges. It is packed with powerful staff 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.

Track on-call, training, vacation, sick leave, and other off-work requests

• Define as many paid and unpaid time-off reasons as you like.
• Simply drag & drop a reason onto the Schedule Planner to mark when a nurse is off-work.
• The Schedule Outlook shows who is off-work and why.
• Available reports provide details on planned vacation, training, and time off hours for any time period you select.

Improve communications by empowering employees with online scheduling self-service access

Available online, 24 hours a day/7 days a week and accessible to employees whether at work or at home, Snap Schedule 365 self-service features cut scheduling and administrative time by making employees more pro-active in the process.

• View Work Schedules: View employee's shift assignments, time-off, shift trades as well as co-workers’ work schedules. From this planner, employees can filter what they want to see, request time off, bid on open shifts, and trade or pick up shifts from co-workers.
• Request Time Off: Employees can make time off/vacation requests, and schedulers can track, manage, approve, or deny those requests. Employees can see the approval status and are automatically alerted when their request is approved or rejected via an in-app notification.
• Trade/Pick Up Shifts: Allow shift trading between employees with or without a scheduler’s approval. Employees can post their assigned shifts to trade with coworkers who are eligible to work the shifts.
• Punch In/Out: Employees can punch in and out of their assigned shifts, and schedulers can see the punch data in real-time in the Punch view or run reports to see the variances between planned vs. actual work hours and costs for any date range.
• Self-scheduling with Open Shifts: Empower employees by letting them self-schedule with open shifts. Schedulers can simply create an open shift for a position and specify the number of employees needed and the required skills.
• View Time Card Information: Employees can view their planned and actual work hours for the current, previous, or next payroll cycle. On-call, overtime, paid and unpaid time-off hours are also presented.
• Look Up Coworkers: Employees can look up coworker’s contact information to call, text, or email. Schedulers decide whom to include or exclude from the directory.
• Update Availability: Save time and stay up-to-date by allowing employees to update their own contact information and availability. Employees can enter their availability information for each day of the week, and in multiple time segments as needed.

Nurse & certification tracking

• Keep complete records of available nurses who may be permanent, full-time or part-time staff, float or per-diem staff, travelers, or registry staff.
• Systematically track credentials and monitor expiration of or renewal dates for certification.
• Use Snap Schedule’s 25 customizable fields in each employee record to track information that is unique to your operation.

Easily Fill Open Shifts

• Quickly find and contact qualified nurses to fill open shifts.
• Fill open shifts 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

• Use the software to easily create rota and shift schedules for particular units or departments, the entire hospital, or an integrated delivery network.
• Define work locations (stations, wards, wings, etc.) 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 asssigned 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 nurse scheduling is a breeze

• Define skills and certifications related to each nurse. Snap Schedule software 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 software's 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 nurse's 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.

Easily publish schedules to nurses and nurse supervisors with Snap Schedule software

• Print schedule views, lists, rosters, assignment calendars, and reports to communicate schedule information to management and nurses.
• Easily publish shift 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.