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Whether your hospital lacks on-call scheduling technology or manages physician schedules manually, poor on-call scheduling wastes the valuable time of your clinical staff. It delays patient care and leads to provider dissatisfaction. Physician on-call schedule management shouldn’t be a manual task.
The connection between call schedules and time to treatment is critical. As patients with emergency medical conditions arrive in the ED or need specialty care, the on-call schedule plays a key role in communicating patient care needs to providers across the organization.
Yet, some hospitals still manage on-call schedules manually, with administrators faxing paper copies of the schedule to departments across the hospital, or manually inputting the schedule to a central location. These manual, inaccurate schedules delay care and frustrate clinical staff.
Up to 40% of communication time is spent attempting, but failing, to reach the correct provider or searching for contact information.1
Clinical communication researchers refer to this as “problematic” time—time that nurses spend trying, but ultimately failing, to communicate with the correct provider. Some examples of problematic time include:
Sound familiar? If so, your communication process might take longer to deliver the result to the lab, specialist, or patient.
An outdated, repetitive process doesn’t just impact nursing staff. Call-center representatives, administrative team members, and physicians need to regularly locate and connect with clinical staff across your hospital. These inefficient workflows cost time and money for the whole organization.
80% of serious medical errors are tied to miscommunication.2
Medical scheduling software is at the heart of communication for any healthcare organization, particularly call shift schedules. Time to treatment not only impacts care quality, but also the patient experience. As more patients are looking for care outside of traditional healthcare settings, speeding up patient care is key to minimizing patient leakage.
Communication delivery is only as accurate as the schedules which direct the solution’s routing rules, even for organizations that have a secure messaging platform. Integrating communication platforms with accurate schedules will improve patient and provider satisfaction.
“In the acute care setting, communication failures lead to increases in patient harm, length of stay, and resource use, as well as more intense caregiver dissatisfaction and more rapid turnover.”1
Communication errors can drive clinical staff morale, satisfaction, and turnover. Clinician turnover can be a huge drain on hospital resources, resulting in lost revenue and increasing labor costs.
So, how do on-call schedules impact provider morale? Here are a couple of ways inaccurate, outdated schedules can foster confusion and frustration:
Studies suggest there’s a connection between quality-of-care delivery and provider satisfaction.1 As communication errors negatively impact patient care, provider satisfaction is likely to be impacted as well. Before providers contemplate exiting your healthcare system, give them a better physician scheduling program.
Implementing a single enterprise-wide on-call scheduling software is the most efficient and cost-effective way to streamline clinical communication for your organization. Not only does it eliminate significant manual work, but it enables better care coordination and drives provider satisfaction.
An enterprise-wide, on-call scheduling platform can streamline hospital communication by enabling:
Download our infographic “6 Reasons to Implement an Enterprise On-Call Scheduling Platform” for a deep dive into the key reasons every hospital should consider an enterprise-wide physician scheduling solution.