Medplanic's high value features
The main goal to achieve first was to automate work while ensuring a high rate of doctors’ satisfaction with the quality of the schedule.
Defining schedule needs based on medical units requests
For better maintenance various “Schedule needs definitions” can be created and stored for later, selective use by automatic schedule generator.
It’s easy to keep different needs for seasonal rosters.
Single need contains medical unit that reports the demand, a type of duty e.g. on-call, week days including public holidays, working hours, medical specialty, a range of required competence levels and number of staff.
Legal issues in staff assignment process
Each time a doctor assignment to the schedule is considered a set of defined rules is checked.
All matching rules must be met.
Thanks to the TAG system used in rule definitions and collaborators’ data, flexible matching rules can be easily applied e.g. no pregnant women can work in emergency unit.
Trainings in roster planning
Preferences for young doctors in roster assignment can be derived from individual training plans.
Medplanic provides a tool for building general training plan separately for every medical specialty.
General training plan is used to control the arrangement of individual plans. Non-compliance notifications are generated and confirmation is required to proceed.
The progress of individual training plan is presented as a timeline and validation of practice in a single unit is also available.
Organizational issues in ensuring high quality of the roster
Each medical unit has developed its best practice in doctors’ work organization.
One of the most crucial factors affecting the organizational quality of the roster are the Assignment patterns usually used for on-calls.
The on-call patterns can be defined for different medical units or groups of units.
The use of effective and expiry dates gives the opportunity to change and apply the patterns at any time.
Part-time job is no longer a challenge
To cope with an increasing percentage of doctors working part-time, a tool for flexible availability description is implemented.
When defining practitioner, besides specialty and competence level, an availability must be provided.
Availability description covers periodically repeating groups of weeks with weekdays set to On/Available or Off/Unavailable.
To continuously manage the changes in doctors’ availability, many patterns can be defined for one doctor thanks to effective and expiry dates provided.
Periods of unavailability can be also presented in a roster in black color by default.
INDIVIDUAL WORK PREFERENCES
Good roster not only meets legal or organizational requirements (so called hard constraints) but also makes people happy (soft constraints).
To meet high doctors’ satisfaction a preference editor is created in connection with availability description.
A single preference is a combination of activity type and medical unit.
For a single day, many combinations can be created and Drag&Drop is used to build and reorder preferences.
Each preference can be set to “Nice to have” or strict “Never”.
Absence management
There is a full stack of various absence types already defined in Medplanic.
Some of them, such as holidays, moving, maternity etc., may have several entitlement policies defined.
Every absence period is presented in the schedule with the acronym, color and extra style if defined but also with full statistics, history and timeline in Collaborator’s profile.
LOOK & FEEL
- Various coloring options for instant and better recognition
- Different roster views and layouts using daily/weekly/monthly/trimestral timelines
- Easy and intuitive forms for data entry
- Drag&Drop feature implemented for even easier data management
- Rich set of options grouped together forms the System settings and lets customize Medplanic to individual needs