Improving Workforce Management, Clinician Wellness, and Patient Access with Better Scheduling

Your care team’s wellness is probably one of your top priorities again in 2023. It impacts everything from retention rates and turnover costs to patient satisfaction and value-based care reimbursements.

Making sure your clinicians are happy and satisfied in their roles means finding effective ways to address the complex issues they face each day. But that can be tough. With such a wide range of difficult challenges, finding the necessary solutions isn’t always easy.

One of the primary causes of decreased clinician wellness is suboptimal scheduling. A 2022 Medscape survey of 13,000 providers found that 39% of clinicians felt a “more manageable work schedule” would lower feelings of burnout.

PerfectServe is on a mission to change that. Lightning Bolt, our provider scheduling solution, improves clinician wellness by addressing each facet of providers’ scheduling needs.

First and foremost, clinicians want fair and balanced schedules. But they also want simple shift swaps and quick approvals for time-off requests. And they want to do it all in real-time, with easy access to a schedule that’s always up to date.

Lightning Bolt makes that happen.

How Optimized Schedules Improve Workforce Management

Lightning Bolt leverages the power of combinatorial optimization to consistently find the best possible schedule for every member of your team. Not just a good schedule—the best.

Team members can enter unlimited scheduling requests and preferences, and Lightning Bolt handles the rest, automatically producing fully optimized schedules. This allows your administrators to finally move away from creating schedules manually and shift their focus toward improving the patient experience.

Automated OR Case Scheduling

For most organizations, surgeries are likely one of the most significant sources of revenue. That means optimizing the OR case schedule is imperative. You can’t risk the errors, delays, and canceled cases that often come with manual processes. And you can’t have anesthesiologists spending hours building these schedules at the end of a full workday. The impact on your bottom line and the well-being of your providers is too substantial.

Lightning Bolt’s OR Case Management is the industry’s only solution that auto-generates daily OR case schedules for anesthesia staff. Just like our provider scheduling solution, it accommodates unlimited rules and preferences.

These can include inputs like specialty requirements, credentialed locations, case complexity, call hierarchy, drive time, PACU responsibility, and teaming preferences. The options and combinations are endless.

The Case Management module also cuts down significantly on the time required to build a schedule. Where the scheduler for an average anesthesiology group may spend an hour or more building and distributing (and then making corrections to) the schedule, OR Case Management can do it in about 12 minutes.

By giving anesthesia staff this level of control over and visibility into their schedules, and by trimming schedule creation time significantly, you can increase overall job satisfaction while lowering burnout and turnover rates. As a bonus, Case Management’s optimized OR schedules also lead to better resource utilization with fewer delays and cancellations.

Accurate Provider Pay

When it comes to paying providers, inefficient manual data entry shouldn’t be part of the process. It’s too important. That’s why PerfectServe’s integrations allow Lightning Bolt to easily connect to and communicate with your payroll system.

The result is provider pay that’s always accurate because payroll knows who worked every shift, regardless of any last-minute changes or swaps. This can save your organization thousands of dollars in mistakes and wasted administrative time, and perhaps more importantly, it ensures providers receive accurate pay in a timely manner.

User Access to Schedules

Lightning Bolt makes it easy for care team members to access and manage their schedules using web and mobile apps. They can swap shifts or make change requests directly from their laptops or phones and get responses almost instantly. All changes are shown in real time, so there’s no chance of miscommunication or uncertainty about who’s working a particular shift.

This level of access is crucial for provider satisfaction. It gives them a level of control they can’t get when scheduling operations are manual, antiquated, or some combination of both. That can substantially affect how they perceive their role within your organization.

When providers feel their day-to-day lives are at the mercy of an outdated scheduling system, it’s bound to lower their sense of job satisfaction. When shift distribution feels inequitable, schedules are hard to find, and requested days off are not regularly approved, it leads to feelings of burnout and a loss of control. Don’t let poor scheduling practices be a drain on provider satisfaction.

Protecting Patient Access

The concept of patient access became more widely discussed following the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which mentioned the term no less than 14 times in different contexts. In its broadest sense, “patient access” simply means the ability for healthcare consumers to access the treatment they need.

As it turns out, scheduling can play a major role here. With an optimized scheduling system like Lightning Bolt, organizations can better align staff resources with patient demand to ensure that those seeking care are not turned away or faced with significant delays because a particular facility is understaffed. And on the flip side, better scheduling practices can also prevent overstaffing, whereby too many providers are working given the current patient load.

Either way, Lightning Bolt can help your organization to better match patient needs and provider availability. This reduces patient leakage, prevents providers from being overworked or underutilized, and ensures that each patient receives the right care at the right time. It’s a big win for all involved.

Ready to learn more about Lightning Bolt? Download the white paper to get all the details on how better scheduling improves workforce management.

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