As a physician or practice manager, providing quality care is your top priority — that often means needing to respond quickly to constant change and dealing with uncertainty and unpredictability.
To help ensure you can provide the best patient care, we’ve worked with other clinics to make team scheduling simple, flexible, and impactful. Read on to learn three reasons why our healthcare customers love Deputy.
1. Create and share schedules in advance
Your practice manager is new and making the upcoming team schedule. Who has the proper training for your patient’s dental surgery? Which employees have restricted schedules due to family or health commitments? What happens if the wrong person is scheduled?
Setting the correct schedule and ensuring the team has adequate coverage is critical to better patient care, happier employees, and a strong patient flow.
With Deputy, you can quickly create an advanced team schedule as far into the future as you like by using schedule templates and the monthly area view.
Set up rules and guardrails within Deputy to ensure the correctly trained staff are scheduled to be in the right place at the right time. By doing this, you can quickly create a schedule that you know works, thus freeing up time to focus on improving efficiency in other areas of your clinic. Once you’ve cracked the code, you can save your team’s favorite schedule as a template for future use, then copy and paste these schedules for coming weeks and months with the click of a button.
Once the schedules have been created, you and your team can also see schedules in advance using our monthly view by area.
What’s best about this view is that it is easy to:
Fix scheduling gaps. Filling a gap in your team schedule with the correctly trained staff member can feel like finding the missing piece to a giant puzzle. With a monthly view in Deputy, practice managers can see a high-level view of any upcoming gaps in the schedule, what the requirements are for that shift, and see who’s qualified and available to fill it.
This also includes a new time off section in the schedule so that you can plan around your staff’s PTO and availability preferences. That way, you can act quickly and ensure in advance the best staff coverage to care for patients.
Sync your schedule with a calendar app. Your staff can share their schedules with those in their life outside of work, so everyone experiences more autonomy related to their schedule, and less burn out from uncertainty of their future availability.
Empower your team to have a better work/life balance. Between last-minute urgent walk-ins to routine checkups, you and your staff are constantly balancing patient concerns. But it is just as essential to make sure you have time to manage life outside of work. Monthly views in Deputy give you a big picture view of the team schedule so you can plan your life — whether you need to schedule childcare, make dinner plans, or organize that much-needed vacation.
2. Adapt to last-minute schedule changes with ease
Changing schedules are inevitable, but with Deputy, they don’t have to be a pain. Practice Managers can respond quickly without sacrificing patient care by filling unexpected gaps in the schedule in any area of the clinic from any device with the offer open shifts feature.
Set rules around who can accept an open shift, ensuring the right patient coverage.
When a change in the schedule does occur, instead of doing the heavy lifting of finding a qualified team member to fill the gap, the team member can send a group notification about the open shift to other qualified team members. The first team member to respond can claim the shift, giving employees increased ownership of their working schedule and any additional hours they choose to work. Since the intricacies of healthcare scheduling can be rather complex, we’ve also implemented an improved manager approval flow, so that the practice manager can have final approval over open shift functionality if desired.
3. Improve work life balance by using Deputy as your scheduling tool
After one of the most difficult years for healthcare practitioners in history, we wanted to provide avenues for thriving clinics to help retain top talent. Our healthcare customers told us that the ability to quickly address the unpredictability of changing schedules, and more importantly, seamlessly communicate the updated schedule across the team had led to stronger relationships in the workplace and happier employees.
Our customers are thrilled because Deputy has helped them master team scheduling, and provided tools and more time for work-life balance.
“Deputy gives back control of my staff’s lives — My department is 90% women, so childcare used to be a delicate balancing act. Now that is managed all in one place with a greater sense of mutual trust that the business has adequate coverage, and enables my staff a better work-life balance.”
Catarina Buffalino,
Director of Ultrasound Department at Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology
We wanted to showcase one last way Deputy can be used as a tool to improve work life balance in the workplace — the new staff coverage planner is yet another one of many helpful time-saving (and mental headspace) hacks we have built especially for Healthcare Practice Managers.
For example, at a clinic that is open seven days a week, you might have a schedule where you have two doctors on weekdays, and just one doctor on weekends. You can now set the number of required staff per area (or role, room, department, etc.) to adjust for things like the number of support staff per FTE physician, allowing you to control the percentage of gross revenue spent on support staff salaries.
Although this feature is still in beta currently, we look forward to releasing it in the next coming weeks.
The staff coverage planner also makes it easy to ensure the right number of qualified staff are in the right place, at the right time, so your patients are looked after, and your team is not pulled in too many directions if a colleague is unavailable for a shift at the last minute.
Make staff scheduling the easiest part of your day. Sign up for a free trial to see how Deputy can erase your scheduling headache — already using Deputy? Use the chat bubble at the bottom of the page to reach out with any questions.
