Practising anaesthetist and HosPortal founder Dr Chris Jones has released a new YouTube presentation challenging one of the most accepted practices in Australian healthcare: building hospital rosters in Excel.
Drawing on more than two decades of clinical and workforce management experience, he explains why manual rostering can consume far more clinical and operational time than many hospital leaders realise, and how one Australian hospital reduced roster preparation time from four days to five hours without compromising the complexity of its workforce requirements.
For many hospitals, Excel has become the default rostering tool.
It is familiar, flexible and, in the hands of experienced users, capable of supporting detailed roster spreadsheets. But according to Dr Jones, the issue isn’t whether Excel is a good spreadsheet application. It’s whether it was ever designed to manage the realities of modern hospital workforce planning.
“I’ve spent the past 15 years sitting across from brilliant, overworked clinicians who are colour-coding spreadsheets at 11 o’clock at night,” says Dr Jones.
“Usually, that person is the senior clinician who trained for 20 years to be a clinician, not an Excel rostering expert.”
Building a hospital roster involves far more than allocating people to shifts.
Medical workforce teams must balance working-hour limits, leave approvals, supervision requirements, staff availability, training commitments, roster fairness, fatigue management, and countless operational changes that occur throughout each roster cycle.
While Excel can record information, Dr Jones argues it cannot actively evaluate those competing requirements as a roster evolves.
Spreadsheets don’t understand whether a junior doctor has exceeded safe working hours across multiple roster periods, whether a shift has appropriate clinical supervision, or how approving leave will affect staffing elsewhere in the roster. Those requirements still need to be checked manually, often by experienced clinicians or workforce managers working through complex rules before the roster is published.
One example from the Royal Hobart Hospital demonstrates the scale of the opportunity. Its roster included:
Building that roster took about four full days per roster cycle.
After being rebuilt within HosPortal, the same roster, with the same workforce, the same operational requirements and the same level of complexity, could be prepared in approximately five hours.
“The complexity didn’t disappear,” says Dr Jones. “The time required to manage it did.”
That’s the distinction hospital leaders should pay attention to.
Importantly, he stresses that this isn’t about making hospital operations simpler. Hospitals continue to manage highly complex workforce requirements. The opportunity lies in reducing the repetitive manual work required to administer them.
Dr Jones says many hospitals underestimate the true cost of manual rostering because they focus on software costs rather than clinical and operational time.
Every hour spent manually checking compliance, reviewing supervision requirements, reconciling leave or rebuilding rosters is an hour experienced clinicians and workforce leaders can’t spend delivering patient care, leading teams or planning services.
He also points to compliance as an area where manual processes create unnecessary exposure.
In many hospitals, compliance with junior doctor working hours, mandatory rest periods and other workforce rules still depends on manual checking. Purpose-built hospital rostering systems can apply those rules automatically before a roster is published, allowing potential issues to be identified earlier rather than after shifts have already been allocated.
While the video walks through HosPortal’s AI Roster Builder, Dr Jones is careful to distinguish it from generative artificial intelligence.
“This is not ChatGPT,” he says. “It solves a defined problem with defined rules.”
Rather than replacing workforce managers or clinical leaders, the system evaluates thousands of possible roster configurations against hospital-defined rules, staff preferences and operational constraints before producing a compliant roster for review.
That philosophy reflects a broader theme that runs throughout HosPortal’s approach to workforce management: AI technology should strengthen human judgement, not replace it.
Dr Jones acknowledges that most hospitals didn’t deliberately choose inefficient rostering processes.
“Most hospital workforce managers generally inherit a system,” he says. “But it’s worth asking what the current approach is really costing.”
For hospital executives, the question is no longer whether rostering is complex. It always will be. The question is whether highly trained clinicians and workforce teams should still be spending days on work that purpose-built technology can help reduce to hours.
To see the Royal Hobart Hospital example and the HosPortal platform in action, watch Dr Chris Jones’ YouTube presentation 4 Days to 5 Hours: A Better Way to Build Hospital Rosters [6:45] on HosPortal’s YouTube channel.
Hospitals reviewing their current rostering processes can also contact HosPortal to discuss where repetitive work, manual checking and avoidable risk may be occurring in their own roster cycle.
Dr Chris Jones is the founder of HosPortal and a practising Australian anaesthetist. For more than two decades, he has worked with hospitals across Australia and New Zealand to develop clinician-designed workforce management solutions that reflect the realities of modern healthcare.