Group Practice Scheduling Software: Fix Physician Schedules

For many practices, growth-based change is a constant. And while growth can be good, it also adds layers of scheduling complexity:

• More locations
• Different physician credentials 
• Increasingly important fairness and equity rules
• Rising patient demand
• Even more last-minute changes

The result is a fragile setup where a single change can unravel everything and make the pieces nearly impossible to put back together. If you’re still relying on manual processes and outdated technology, keeping up becomes a tall task. 

To compound these difficulties, patients are often booked weeks or even months in advance, adding a lot of uncertainty for practices that can only schedule one or two weeks out.

When you can’t keep up with complexity, the consequences can be severe. One group started building out their December schedule, only to realize that one of their physicians had already exceeded their shift allocation for the year. The result? That physician had to take an entire month off. This disrupted patient care, reduced the number of providers available to work, and forced other providers to pick up unexpected shifts to close the gaps.

The average group practice has to overcome staffing constraints from time to time, and that means they probably don’t have “excess” staff to devote specifically to provider scheduling.

As a result, scheduling often falls to whoever has the time, context, or patience. According to Tanner Vinson, a scheduling expert at PerfectServe, that responsibility is picked up by physicians about 50-60% of the time. 

That may seem like a logical workaround at face value—you’re not hiring someone else and physicians are usually intimately familiar with scheduling nuances—but it’s actually inefficient and expensive in practice.

One practice we talked to reported spending $185,000 a year on billable physician hours—just for scheduling.

Giving physicians scheduling duties is also detrimental to job satisfaction. To put it mildly, they don’t embark on their careers in medicine because they love battling Excel spreadsheets after logging a busy day treating patients. This kind of “pajama time” is a common and unfortunate phenomenon.

“Tools range from dedicated products to Excel templates—which don’t account for preferences and requests,” notes Tanner. “I’ve even seen some practices using pen and paper.”  

Outdated or manual scheduling processes are rarely integrated with communication tools, which means the wrong physicians are often contacted about patients, leaving the right physician (and the patient) in the dark. 

Ryer Hedderman, another member of PerfectServe’s scheduling team, elaborates, saying, “Once you’re dealing with 10, 20, or even 50 to 100 people with their own contracts, preferences, and availability, scheduling becomes overwhelming.”

Imagine you’re the sole person responsible for building schedules. Each time the process begins, you have to navigate a daunting web of emails, text messages, sticky notes, and other asynchronous communication channels to make sure your schedule accounts for your organizational requirements, individual requests, and preferences from dozens of providers. Mistakes and oversights are bound to happen, and the process won’t be pleasant.

Ultimately, your vendor should act like a consultant, offering real, experience-based insights like: 

• Here’s how similar-sized groups optimize weekend coverage
• Here’s how others built their credentialing logic 
• Here’s how teams like yours can reduce admin time by 50%
• Here’s how to distribute shifts in a way that doesn’t overburden any one provider

This kind of pre-implementation discussion can help define your automation and optimization needs and guide documentation of relevant scheduling rules. For some vendors, it amounts to something like a free scheduling consultation that allows them to demonstrate their expertise and how a potential partnership might unfold.

The PerfectServe support team takes their consultative role seriously. “This is what they live and breathe, day in and day out,” says Katey Bailey, PerfectServe’s VP of Provider Scheduling. “There’s not just a commitment to getting customers launched on the platform—there’s an ongoing, deep commitment to helping them get the absolute most out of their investment.” 

Once you’ve laid the groundwork for optimized scheduling, your group practice is ready to take its scheduling operations to the next level. 

It’s hard to overstate the administrative impact of this technology: One health system reduced payroll processing time by 2,000 hours per year by linking its scheduling and payroll systems to automatically sync shifts and eliminate human error.

But the benefits go even deeper:

No doctor wants every Friday, Saturday, or overnight shift. It’s unsustainable, hurts work-life balance, and impacts patient care.

Scheduling software helps prevent those situations. “It addresses fair scheduling and provider wellness by ensuring equalization across providers, while also honoring contractual and group requirements,” explains Katey.

Schedulers and practice owners can answer questions like:

• How are physician workloads?
• Are they accidentally scheduled for too many nights and weekends?
• Are we appropriately balancing “difficult” shifts?

A lot of group practices simply don’t have the tools to track schedule fairness with this level of granularity.

Fair scheduling results in less burnout and better patient care—but there’s another layer to equity. When schedules are fair, and especially when physicians can feel that they’re fair, “They’re more engaged at work and excited to be there,” explains Ryer.

“The most straightforward use case for scheduling software is generating schedules through rules-based automation,” says Tanner. “Even something as simple as ‘You’re here Monday, I’m here Tuesday’ saves time.”

But the real efficiency kicks in when the software captures all that institutional knowledge—preferences, PTO requests, and credentials—and automatically factors it into every schedule. This eliminates the need for email follow-ups, faxes, and notes left on someone’s desk.

Automation is especially useful for credentialing rules. “Providers often need credentials or certifications to work at clinics; managing that manually is hard,” Tanner explains. Scheduling software makes that process much smoother by using rules to match providers with the locations and procedures that align with their credentials. If they’re not credentialed for a certain location, they’ll never be scheduled there.

Clinicians already have demanding jobs and full lives outside of the practice. Without a more capable scheduling platform, physicians can lose out on their personal time. “Instead of spending time with family, they’re spending hours and hours creating schedules,” explains Katey. 

With the right automation approach, practices can build better-balanced schedules and tamp down on pajama time for physicians, ensuring they can invest their full energy in patient care while giving them adequate time to physically and mentally recover. As a result, practices and medical groups can better manage the realities of providing care while still prioritizing their physicians’ overall well-being and reducing burnout.