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The most expensive equipment in your
hospital could be the scheduling board!

Is your rehab department still using a white board? Magnetic board? Excel sheets? Some other manual method of scheduling? If so, here are just some of the ways you are paying a fortune every day to manage your department schedule by hand…

1. You’re losing valuable time that could be spent on patient care. Many rehab departments ask the therapists to do much of the scheduling. While they know best who can be doubled, who can be dovetailed, when timed and untimed codes will overlap, etc. – the billable time that could be spent on patient care adds up quickly, even if it’s just 15-30 minutes a day.

Instead of asking these high-paid professionals to run back forth to a scheduling board making appointments, display the scheduling grid on monitors or printouts. Then establish trust and communication between your therapists and schedulers. Give your schedulers training and a set of rules to follow that cover common scheduling scenarios. Then establish text and email communication between your therapists and scheduling aids, so that your therapists maintain the control they need without constantly running to a board.

2. You’re spending precious FTEs on scheduling that could be more productive. A scheduling board on the wall is an incredibly inefficient tool for a hospital. If you’re writing, erasing and rescheduling dozens or hundreds of appointments a day by hand, the difference in efficiency between a board or Excel sheet and an electronic scheduling system made for rehab could be a full FTE or more.

For example, one large inpatient rehab hospital that uses specialized inpatient scheduling software schedules 120 patients and 80 therapists a day with just 1.75 FTEs — compared to four or five FTEs required at institutions of similar size.

3. You’re losing appointments that cost you revenue. A rehab department deals with numerous last-minute changes and scheduling conflicts with other departments in the hospital...it's difficult to find open time slots for all of the recurring appointments common to rehab...and re-entering data already in your HMS inevitably leads to errors. All of these factors cause you to lose patient appointments -- and that means LESS REVENUE.

Software designed for the unique needs of inpatient rehab scheduling or outpatient rehab scheduling can easily communicate with your hospital’s HMS system. So you don't have to re-enter data already in your hospital system...you can easily schedule recurring appintments...and you are alerted instantly when scheduling conflicts arise with other departments, making it more likely you can reschedule and save the appointment.

If you'd like to know more about scheduling software designed specifically for hospital departments like yours, call SpectraSoft today at 1-800-889-0450. There’s no excuse to keep getting white board marker on your finger and clothes!

Let us know how you’re doing and if this article was helpful by emailing PMN at editor@practicemanagementnews.com.

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