Scheduling Software for Nursing Homes, Long-Term Care, and Assisted Living Facilities

Long-term care facilities and nursing homes operate 24/7, 365 days a year. In order to deliver quality, long-term care facilities need to schedule skilled staff and the right resources at the right place, right time. Managing shift schedules to maintain the required staffing levels, balancing skill sets across shifts, and providing training for new staff present many scheduling challenges. Snap Schedule scheduling software for nursing homes and long-term care facilities can address these complex problems and assist administrators and managers in staffing shifts and departments more efficiently than manual, paper-based scheduling processes.

Long term care staff scheduling software must take into account the availability of qualified personnel; therapists' and 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 assisted living organizations must document, by means of staffing reports, that they are meeting, or trying to meet the ratios.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently enhanced its Nursing Home Compare public reporting site to include a set of quality ratings for each nursing home that participates in Medicare or Medicaid. The CMS Five Star quality rating is composed of scores in three areas — health inspection, staffing, and quality measures. Maintaining high ratings in the CMS Five Star quality rating system is vital to the success of a long-term care facility. Workforce scheduling software like Snap Schedule and effective processes can go a long way toward addressing staffing, retention, compliance, and quality challenges.

Snap Schedule Scheduling Capabilities

Snap Schedule Employee Scheduling Software helps nursing homes and long-term care facilities 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 employees and shifts with Snap Schedule software

• Schedule nurses and nursing home staff such as clerical, administrative, or housekeeping staff
• Drag & drop to easily assign shifts, mark on-call and time off, move or copy assignments.
• View assignments and schedule nurses and staff from three different views. Use whichever view is easiest and most effective for your scheduling tasks.
• Create rolling shift schedules for nurses and support staff – from days to years.

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.

Skill & certification tracking

• Ensure consistency in staffing and track certification of employees.
• Keep complete records of available nurses who may be permanent, full-time or part-time staff, float or per-diem staff, agancy, or contract 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.

Flexible multi-location scheduling

• Use the software to easily create shift schedules for particular units or departments, the entire facility, 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 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.