Call Scheduler

The hospital is a large specialty hospital with very complex on-call needs. They have over 40 specialties and throughout the organization they generate about 80 call schedules. The hospital currently has a home-grown on-call system that allows each "schedule generator" to manually enter the call schedule into the "system". The change process is cum... bersome and often the wrong provider is called due to lack of accurate information. There are many problems with the outdated system and the hospital has decided to purchase something new. The "new system" purchasing process was handed over to Information Technology (IT) to find vendors, decide what is important, and choose a vendor. IT created a "requirements" document that outlined what the hospital wanted the new system to do and gave it to each potential supplier to be sure their system could meet the hospitals requirements. After careful review of the requirements document it appeared that the hospital was trying to replace the current system. Now at first glance that might not sound like a bad idea, but what if the original system either intentionally or unintentionally omitted more than half of the "whole process"? Let me explain what I mean. The current system has Department Chairs or head Doctor manually creating a call schedule each month for his specialty. Now some of the 80 call schedule creators may have gone out and purchased "call schedule creation" software on their own. They did this so they would have some tools to assist them in the creation, maintenance and communication of the schedule to the other doctors. The "scheduler" gives the final monthly call schedule to an "administrative-type" person who then manually enters it into the current outdated on-call system. This is done so that the hospital operators can look-up who is on-call and page the proper doctor when requested. In summary you have one of the highest paid people in the department, a doctor, creating the call schedule; some even paying for software, and then someone else manually ...Read More