Hospital rostering has always been one of the most demanding and time-consuming tasks in any hospital — no matter the size, specialty, or staffing model.
Whether it’s senior consultants working through intricate shift rules or administrators manually checking compliance for hundreds of junior doctor rosters, the work can quickly become slow, stressful and prone to human error.
Royal Hobart Hospital (RHH) was no exception. Its team faced the same pressures experienced across Australia: the need to maintain safe coverage, meet complex industrial and training requirements, and protect staff wellbeing — all while running an efficient service.
For RHH, building a roster often stretched into a four-day task. Administrators and senior doctors were manually applying:
Every draft roster required dozens of checks. This included 14 shift conflict rules, nine work rules, five user conflict rules and 44 roster patterns.
The impact of this manual approach was felt across the hospital:
For administrators and clinical leaders, the combination of manual workload, compliance pressure and constant change made rostering one of the most challenging recurring tasks in the hospital.
HosPortal’s origins lie directly in these real-world challenges. As a practising anaesthetist, founder Dr Chris Jones experienced the complexities of hospital rostering from multiple perspectives — as a junior doctor juggling training requirements and leave, and later as a consultant watching colleagues spend hours managing rosters instead of treating patients.
“As a working doctor, I experienced firsthand the struggles of building and managing rosters that balanced leave, skills, training needs and preferences,” Dr Jones said. “It became clear that an online tool could make the process simpler, safer and far less stressful for clinicians and administrators.”
Motivated by these insights, Dr Jones created HosPortal, a clinician-led rostering platform that’s been shaped over more than 15 years through ongoing refinement and feedback from more than 65 hospitals and 8,000 healthcare professionals across Australia and New Zealand.
This foundation — built from lived clinical experience rather than purely technical design — became central to HosPortal’s evolution and trust within the sector.
Building on this clinician-led foundation, HosPortal has expanded its capabilities with an AI-driven rostering system designed to address the most time-consuming and complex aspects of modern hospital rostering.
At RHH, this meant implementing an approach that reflected the real daily pressures of roster management. Working closely with roster administrators and senior clinicians at RHH, HosPortal’s team implemented a software solution that delivered:
What once required four days of manual effort became a process completed in four to five hours.
This shift to clinician-led, AI-supported rostering at RHH delivered clear benefits across teams:
Administrators described the system as faster, simpler, and far more predictable to work with.
Senior clinicians welcomed a process that preserved clinical time while maintaining the right skill mix.
Junior doctors benefited from rosters that aligned with training requirements and supported safer working hours.
RHH’s experience highlights several insights that are relevant for hospitals nationwide:
Australian hospitals face increasing pressure — with workforce shortages, rising compliance expectations and stronger focus on clinician wellbeing. Traditional rostering processes, whether paper-based, spreadsheet-driven or software-assisted, are struggling to keep pace.
Clinician-led, AI-enabled tools now offer hospitals a way to manage these pressures with greater accuracy, consistency and fairness.
RHH’s experience shows what’s possible when rostering evolves. This results in:
If your hospital is looking to create more time, improve compliance and support staff wellbeing, then contact us to learn more about the benefits that clinician-developed AI rostering software can offer.