We recently set a new record for the time to fill an annual on-call roster: fifteen minutes. Let me write that again: 365 shifts across a 12-month roter allocated across over 200 doctors in less than 15 minutes. See ‘Hospital B’ on the chart here.Actually, we thought we’d set a record only a few hours […]
We are constantly surprised at how many different methods our customers use to prepare their on-call rosters. Some hospitals are extremely hands-on, with explicit rules and lots of analysis to ensure equity and balance across the shifts and users. Others are extremely laissez faire, and happy to open the roster and let market forces take […]
More feedback from the self-roster season. We have had a number of discussions about how long you should allow for people to pick their shifts in a self-roster process.The answer is: two weeks.This is shorter than almost any period of time suggested by our customers when we raise this topic with them. Often roster administrators […]
At HosPortal it is self-roster season, with many hospitals getting ready for anesthetic on-call rosters starting in February and March next year.All of our private hospitals currently underway are setting self-roster quotas based on the amount of activity done by each doctor: doctors with higher activity are given a higher requirement of on-call shifts.The challenge […]
We at HosPortal like it when things just work in our daily challenge of managing the data associated with thousands of users, hundreds of rosters and dozens of hospitals. But our business is not populated by saints. So, as this P.J. O’Rouke quote would imply, we strive to keep our workplace data clean, and we implore all […]
A common part of HosPortal’s sales discussion involves how to justify the benefits of improved rostering to the hospital bean-counters. The summary is that HosPortal can save you a lot, but the more complete answer is that it depends on your own hospital environment, and what you value in addition to time savings.Being the analytical […]
Once you have set the roster start date (see earlier post), you need to prepare properly: rushing a self-roster process results in bad roster outcomes and unhappy administrators and doctors.You should start your planning a few months before the first shift is scheduled to commence. The timeline that seems to work best for our customers […]
The team at HosPortal often reflects on good design. Recent discussion includes why, after about 5,000 years of design refinement across the globe, you can still buy teapots that drip when you pour them.But of all topics, nothing gets us more passionate than seeing both good and bad software design. We do not always get […]
If you are a private hospital and considering your next self-roster process, or a public hospital and have on-call shifts that would be easier to do through self-roster, then we at HosPortal have some good insight on best practices. We will post some of these over the coming weeks.For this post, we will focus on […]
HosPortal has a distinctive insight into the various ways in which hospitals manage their rostering. The approach – and the level of cooperation from the participating doctors – is the result of a combination of factors distinctive to each hospital environment.We have seen various influences on the way on-call rostering is done in those hospitals:Tradition – […]