Scheduling Automation at Legacy Laboratory Services | Improving Productivity and Employee Morale
The Legacy Health Scheduling Challenge
Legacy Laboratory Services (LLS) is part of Legacy Health, a Portland, Oregon health system compromised of six hospitals, more than 50 clinics plus research, hospice and reference and hospital lab testing. LLS is an independent regional reference laboratory servicing the Legacy Health network of hospitals and clinics as well as others in the community.
Due to a variety of issues, staff and management within LLS were experiencing significant challenges around staff scheduling.
Some of the issues included:
- Highly varied, 24×7 shifts
- Employees with a variety of skill levels and pay grades
- People with certain certifications required for specific jobs and/or shifts
- Need to reduce overtime
- Need to reduce errors in scheduling
- Desire to create more transparent schedules for staff and management
- Desire to put the schedule online
- Need to coordinate shifts across multiple, geographically dispersed sites
- Desire to standardize scheduling practices across multiple facilities across a wide region
The Scheduling Automation Solution
LLS was introduced to the StaffReady Scheduling module, one of the modules in the StaffReady platform of operational products for laboratories.
A small pilot was performed in the Laboratory department at Legacy Meridian Park Medical Center. Staff in this laboratory assisted in implementing the solution and providing an evaluation on the recommendation to move forward. Over the next year, the deployment quickly expanded to include additional departments, clinics and facilities within the Legacy Health network.
Today, roughly 650 Legacy staff are now actively implemented and utilizing StaffReady Scheduling across their wide geographic service area.
Benefits Recognized
LLS took the bold move to transition from manual scheduling (paper, whiteout, highlighters and spreadsheets) to an automated software solution. The process to change a system as complex and multi-layered as scheduling is never an easy one, but administrators, managers and staff have never looked back.
Some of the biggest savings and benefits the system has recognized to date:
- Significant time reduction in managing and creating scheduling and communicating schedule information to staff
- Automatic shift assignments based on skill level, site location and job description
- Elimination of manual, paper-and-email-based leave management system
- Improved employee morale around online access to schedules, scheduling information and leave management
- Ability to select staff for shifts based on hours work to eliminate overtime
- Reduction in scheduling errors and dropped shifts
- Single, centralized location for multiple schedules across entire geographic region
- Easy standardization of schedule and HR rule practices across entire organization
- Access to all schedule data for report generation and trend analysis
- Ability to proactively eliminate overtime with artificial intelligence (AI) shift alerts
From initial pilot to system adoption, Legacy Health continues to be an exceptional client partner with satisfaction and use of StaffReady modules since 2011.
If you’d like to learn more about how StaffReady can help your organization achieve similar success, let’s get connected today and book a free demo with one of our experts.
