Success Story: Firelands Regional Medical Center

May 23, 2023

Firelands Regional Medical Center Simplifies Scheduling Across Multiple Departments

Customer

Firelands Regional Medical Center is a 424-bed integrated healthcare system, serving an Ohio region with over 300,000 residents. The facility employs nearly 2,600 medical staff members and was one of only two hospitals in the state to receive both Healthgrades® America’s 100 Best for Orthopedic Surgery™ and Spine Surgery™ in 2018. It was also named among the top 10 percent in the nation for patient safety in 2017. The health system is a Verified Level III Trauma Center, Certified Primary Stroke Center and is the area’s only Breast Imaging Center of Excellence.

Challenge

Supervisors at Firelands Regional Medical Center were struggling to manage the complexities of scheduling a staff of more than 2,000 employees. They would create schedules using an unsupported software system, then print paper copies and post them in each unit. Changes were made manually, resulting in schedules that were confusing and difficult to read. There was no system in place for announcing schedule changes, so employees and managers often had incorrect information. The poor communication created problems such as scheduling errors, double-booked employees, and unnecessary overtime costs. Additionally, schedules could not be shared across the organization. This made it difficult to manage schedules for employees working in multiple locations or departments.

Employees submitted shift trade, time-off and other requests on paper. Supervisors were forced to spend hours each week organizing shift trades, and even more time sifting through time-off requests and entering them into the system manually. This not only took supervisors away from other responsibilities, but often resulted in overlooked or misplaced schedule requests – frustrating employees and negatively impacting morale.

Ensuring proper shift coverage was also a manual process. Supervisors would count the number of employees scheduled for each shift and calculate whether the number was correct. The health system was left vulnerable to the possibility of improper staffing levels due to human error.

“With our previous scheduling method, shift trades and requests were done on paper, which was extremely overwhelming and time consuming.” Beth Hartz

Solution

Firelands Regional Medical Center replaced its outdated scheduling system with ScheduleAnywhere employee scheduling software. The new solution offers all employees 24/7 access to up-to-the-minute schedules. Multiple schedules can be shared among departments in both inpatient and outpatient settings, which is critical since employees can appear on more than one schedule. With this visibility across the organization, managers with shared employees always know where and when each one is scheduled. They can also see a shared employee’s total scheduled hours, helping to reduce overtime costs.

Employees can submit cover, swap, time-off, and other schedule requests online. This saves time and eliminates the frustration of misplaced or overlooked requests. When deciding whether to accept or deny those requests, managers can easily see any potential conflicts with previously scheduled shifts. Schedules automatically update when changes are made, and all affected employees are notified.

ScheduleAnywhere also performs staffing calculations based on each department’s specific criteria, such as acuity numbers or census counts. This frees managers from the task of manually counting scheduled employees . Now they can instantly see whether the appropriate number of qualified employees are scheduled according to shift, position, skill, department, or location.