While we were demonstrating our rostering software to the Australian and New Zealand psychiatrists at the RANZCP conference in Cairns last week we discovered a short but excellent book about design. Unusually, it was about toilets.One of our fellow exhibitors was advocating for dementia patients, and they had a short, 35-page booklet all about designing […]
Every year or so we look at our activity metrics to see how things are changing. We have recently done this and were pleasantly reassured that our growth is also reflected in a range of metrics across the business. See the graphic here representing activity in 2018, and how it compares to the year before.Interestingly, […]
In short: Accrediting more doctors for on-call than the hospital needs is not a free option: large on-call rosters raise administration costs and change the behaviour of the doctors on them, with a small group ending up carrying the roster. This post argues for keeping the accredited group close to the number of doctors who […]
HosPortal is having great success in expanding our rostering to the non-anaesthetic craft groups, such as physicians, surgeons and radiologists (see last blog post). The organisational change challenge But the issues of growing to new customers are not always technical, as our earlier radiology example explained. Some are behavioural: how to get doctors to use […]
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 […]
In short: Fair theatre-list quotas come from measuring each anaesthetist’s activity and setting their on-call obligation in proportion to it. The two workable measures are scheduled sessions per cycle and actual sessions worked over a period; this post, written during the 2017 self-roster season, explains the difference and when each is fair. HosPortal now calculates […]
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 […]