Healthcare scheduling has been a manual process that causes not only inefficiencies, but a financial burden on healthcare organizations. With the rise of in-home healthcare, independent contractor relationships and extended service hours, healthcare organizations need to rely on mobile workforce management for their healthcare scheduling needs.
Leading healthcare organizations are learning how to better utilize their resources and reduce the manual processes of managing their employees.
The true cost of manual healthcare scheduling
25% of all healthcare organizations today are still scheduling their practitioners using paper-based tools. Paper and pen might seem cheap and easy, but only on the purchasing end. In reality, the costs start racking up when you take a more holistic view of your organization.
Add up your staffing costs related to the time spent on manual scheduling. Then add in the costs of transferring those schedules to a communication channel like email, text, phone, etc. Next add the cost of schedule adjustments and correcting errors generated by miscommunications.
On top of all that, there’s another layer of opportunity costs when managers can’t access data or derive any insights from schedules created on paper. All that data is just shredded or thrown away, so your organization can’t learn or improve performance.
For healthcare organizations with practitioners in the field visiting patients, the ability to schedule the right practitioner to the right job with the right skill set at the right time becomes time consuming and almost impossible to manage at scale.
Getting scheduling right is essential because there are costs associated with overstaffing, understaffing and constantly adjusting schedules. There is also a negative impact on the patient experience when scheduling isn’t done right.
One step up from paper
Manual scheduling includes more than just paper or whiteboard scheduling, though. Another 19% of healthcare organizations generate schedules manually using technology from last century like Excel. Successful healthcare organizations have abandoned manual processes like these. Spreadsheets retain the essential drawbacks of paper, and also create version control issues. Multiple versions of amended schedules clog up inboxes and end up confusing the staff.
Despite this basic automation, this method of healthcare scheduling is still labor intensive and causes even more detrimental issues for your organization.
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Automation as a best practice
Healthcare organizations need to rely on technology to cut costs, improve operational efficiencies, and enhance patient experience.
The best automated healthcare scheduling system can:
- Manage and accommodate a diverse workforce of full-time, part-time, and temporary contract workers
- Automatically assign the right practitioner to the right patient based on the practitioners specializations, certifications, location, availability, and more
- Match healthcare professionals who have previous experience with a given patient or their family
- Submit profiles for each of your healthcare professionals with expiration of certificates, skill sets, etc, to ensure there are no hiccups while getting the job done
- Collect data about the appointments in real time
- Send your practitioners the job details they need in time to prep for their appointment
- Communicate in real time with your healthcare professionals
Organizations have seen over a 33% increase in the number of patients each practitioner can handle by leveraging mobile workforce management solutions for their healthcare scheduling needs.
5 secrets to better healthcare scheduling
Administrative costs drop when healthcare scheduling is automated and evaluates resource planning to maximize utilization of your practitioners. Greater productivity lowers operating costs and clear visibility into your practitioners eliminates expensive disconnects.
Download our ebook 5 Secrets to Better Scheduling of Mobile Workers for In-Home Healthcare.
Inside, you’ll find insider secrets on operating more efficiently and statistics on the state of healthcare industry today. You’ll also learn about back office automation to lower your costs and help your healthcare business grow to meet the demands of the new mobile market.
