In short: Availability-based rostering is a middle path between self-rostering and manual allocation: doctors mark every shift they could work, without racing for the best ones, and the administrator or the roster builder then allocates for fairness and suitability. This post explains the steps and when a department should prefer it over first-pick self-rostering. We […]
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 […]
In the last post we noted that we do not have a rostering app. But at HosPortal we know that doctors don’t like taking ‘no’ for an answer. So if you are still desperate for app-like functions there are a few of things you can do: Subscribe to our iCal sync tool (see a previous blog post). […]
This page was a post from long ago about why did not have an app. Today our position has changed! As of August 2026 HosPortal and both an iOS and android app available for download from their respective stores.
Despite the usual New Year quiet period, we have all been pretty busy here at HosPortal.We are pleased to start the new year with our new iCal integration, which will allow users to receive automatic updates regarding their HosPortal schedule directly to their iOS or Android phone, computer or Microsoft Outlook calendar…anything that accepts an iCal […]
Chris, Charles, Seema, Georgie and the rest of the team at HosPortal would like to wish all our users, customers and partners the very best for the season.We recently prepared our 2017 benchmark report for our customers and were pleased to confirm the following activity over the last 12 months: Rostered users: 2,900 in three states Regular […]
Even the best and most robustly-designed software needs to be updated and maintained. HosPortal has recently had an interesting experience to keep ahead of the spam filters used on almost every commercial email service. Like the US Postal Service (or the Angarium, for the classically minded) we take our communications seriously.HosPortal’s outward emails are critical […]
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 […]
As we have mentioned before, there are a bunch of hospitals going through self-rostering for 2018 now. We woke up this morning to this lovely email from a doctor who works across a half-dozen HosPortal hospitals and obviously a few others. “I view your software as superior in every way [to a competitor] and you […]
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 […]
In short: On-call rosters are often carried by a small minority: HosPortal’s data across hospitals showed half of all on-call shifts done by about ten percent of the doctors on the roster. This post looks at what that means for accreditation decisions and fairness rules. The pattern still holds, and HosPortal’s counters and quota rules […]