Academic Medical Center Reclaims 1,000+ Hours Per Year with Optimized Scheduling

Committed to the pillars of academic healthcare and the pursuit of advanced medicine and patient care, UK HealthCare is an award winning healthcare system and research institution with a Level I trauma center and Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Challenges

UK HealthCare was spending a substantial amount of time building provider schedules by using dated methods for shift swapping and approvals, which made it difficult to maintain shift and oncall equity and required a great deal of administrative support. As errors became commonplace and shift change approval rates plummeted, provider workload and stress increased. The hospitalist group recognized the need to address their complex provider scheduling demands with a more advanced solution.

Solution

After enduring years of inefficient processes, UK HealthCare implemented PerfectServe Lightning Bolt Scheduling to optimize and manage their demand. Provider Scheduling enabled administrators to quickly create complete schedules based on the hospitalists’ unique needs. 

The transparency and flexibility of the web-based platform allowed administrators to create unbiased schedules, access the most up-to-date version, and easily account for providers’ personal preferences. This resulted in the maintenance of shift equity, promotion of work-life balance, and an increase in provider utilization.

Results

Lightning Bolt has delivered dramatic results by reducing the hours spent building provider schedules from 1,480 to as little as 260 hours per year. UK HealthCare’s providers were given the ability to self-swap shifts on the go without heavy administrative involvement. Equalization of jeopardy, night, weekend, and swing shifts prevailed, and difficulties maintaining shift and on-call schedules disappeared. This led to the recovery of up to 1,220 hours of productivity that had been lost annually to inefficient scheduling processes in previous years.