Background: Physician burnout is increasingly becoming a national healthcare crisis. It has been shown to have unfavorable outcomes on individual wellness, productivity, quality of care and patient satisfaction. Many organizations, therefore, continue to focus their efforts in developing strategies to improve physician satisfaction and engagement in their workforce. One effective approach may be to create a streamlined and flexible scheduling method to promote a work-life balance.
Purpose: We aimed to transform our manual physician scheduling process through the implementation of an automated scheduling software. Our objective was to: 1. Increase physician autonomy and flexibility in scheduling to improve physician satisfaction. 2. Optimize efficiency in physician scheduling by reducing the amount of physician time required to build, modify and maintain the schedule.
Description: Our physician group is comprised of approximately 120 hospitalists spanning across two tertiary care centers. We offer a hybrid of clinical rotations with different hours and consecutive days providing us the opportunity to accommodate a majority of personal schedule requests. The current scheduling process involves two full time hospitalists with a protected administrative time, responsible for the creation and maintenance of the hospitalists’ schedule. Prior to our implementation of the scheduling software, individual schedule requests were submitted through email. The block schedule, each block consisting of 5 weeks, was then manually created, published, and modified using the Microsoft Excel program. The online scheduling platform is equipped with a number of functionalities that enable the automation of the schedule based on rules and individual skillsets and streamline the process of managing requests, swaps and changes in the schedule. Furthermore, providers are able to access the most up-to-date schedule on any device. Before and after the scheduling software went into effect at our institution, we surveyed our physician group to gauge everyone’s experience with the scheduling process during the pre and post implementation period. Additionally we tracked hospitalist-administrator’s time spent on scheduling.Our survey results revealed that physician satisfaction with the scheduling process increased from 54% to 67% and the ease of making schedule requests increased from 61% to 67%. 71% of the hospitalists reported satisfaction with their schedule requests being honored using the new automated scheduling platform as opposed to 63% in the pre-implementation era. Physician satisfaction with being able to make changes to the schedule once the schedule has been finalized also increased from 40% to 69%. Lastly, more than half of our group experienced improvement in their scheduling autonomy (42% to 54%). Moreover, after the online scheduling software was implemented, we observed a 20% reduction in the hospitalist-administrator’s time spent on scheduling.
Conclusions: A transition to an online automated scheduling software can improve staff satisfaction with the scheduling process and decrease administrative time spent on scheduling. Although associated with a significant cost, purchase of scheduling software may be a worthwhile investment to help reduce the risk of physician burnout and improve satisfaction in the long run.