Scheduling - complex, controling and confidence?

[TCheers]

Hello everyone,

I figured that scheduling would be huge on here since scheduling impacts all of us but when I search for scheduling all the posts I saw were from years ago.

I have recently been tasked with doing some research for my hospital on new scheduling systems and wanted to get input from people that actually use them before having to talk to some salesmen.

When I search on here for scheduling the first thing that comes up is two ads for API and ShgiftHound. My hospital went to API about a year and a half ago, the decision was supposed to include nursing but IT locked us out and chose them. We were all angry but at the time our CNO was on the way out and she didn't want to rock the boat so we got stuck with a system that was/is truly horrible. From a staff perspective it's slow and isn't user friendly. I moved to managment and then the real work began, I won't go into bashing but just to say that it's taken 1 1/2 years and now more than half our nursing departments went back to excel. The messaging is the worst and we just couldn't get things done.

So, here we are and now we get to make the next decision, I think IT is staying out of it since they made the wrong decision last time. We are a Kronos house so we will naturally look at them, since I don't know anything about ShiftHound and they placed an ad on here I'll give them a try. My question is to any/everyone:

Which ones have you used and which one should I look at? I naturally did a google search and found the following:

Kronos

ShiftWizard

Clarvia

SmartSquare

ScheduleAnywhere

Anything you can offer will be helpful and I'll put in my report as background info from our peers.

THANKS EVERYONE!!!!

[kiszi, RN]

My hospital went to Clarvia a while back for self-scheduling. So far I am not impressed. All staff members had to attend a four hour class to learn the system, and people are still having trouble with doing basic functions. Too cumbersome and not user-friendly IMO.

[TCheers]

Four hours class? That would mean I need to pay the staff to take the class and others to fill the shifts. Your not impressed? How long ago did you guys switch and do you use it at a management level?

[cindy_webb]

We use ShiftHound in our facility and it is super easy to use for both managers and staff and does most scheduling tasks very well. Their tools to fill open shifts for call-offs etc are the best out there from what I have seen, and their new supervisor view that was just released is really useful. We used to use ShiftWizard in our facility but IMO it was too clunky and difficult for managers to learn, most of our people didn't like it. They try to do too much and and don't seem know healthcare staffing very well. ShiftHound replaced them about a year ago and is much better at the daily firefight of staffing. I have also used Kronos and OneStaff in my career, both are old and difficult to learn and use, really dinosaurs, you don't want to go there. I don't know about the others.

[nicholly1011]

We are an ambulatory multi care specialty organization with over 180 clinical departments and 70 locations. We transitioned from a paper - pencil scheduling process to an on line program called Shifthound about 7 years ago and have been extremely satisfied with the outcome. Shifthound representatives are helpful and responsive to our requests and needs and provide enhancements routinely. Training is quick and easy, it takes approximately 5 to 10 minutes to instruct employees on how to log in, review schedules and request time off and for managers training is about 30 minutes to understand scheduling and approve time off. Additional benefits are the real time updates, employees receive an automatic email sent from Shifthound for time off approved or denied and any schedule changes via email or text. Shift Templates are helpful when employees have consistent schedules, there is one click involved to roll out the same schedule for the future. When we consider the number of locations, variety of roles and different types of schedules it is very easy to see where the employees are scheduled to work. Reports can also be downloaded to excel for easy manipulation and because of the efficiency of the system it is certainly cost saving to our organization.

Lynn Nicholson MSN RN

Director of Clinical Education and Staff Development

Summit Health Management