We have been writing a series in this blog, laying out a roadmap for a successful healthcare scheduling implementation. This is a topic that is near & dear to us since scheduling is the hub of workforce management in healthcare. And workforce management at Axsium is, of course, our bread & butter, our wheelhouse, where we park our truck, etc. (you get the idea…!).
Now that we are at the halfway point of the roadmap, I want to stop and recap where we’ve traveled along our journey and what we have coming up to look forward to. We started out defining a strong foundation for the structure of the implementation and have just gotten into a few of the practical considerations of the actual deployment. Here’s how it has gone down so far:
- Implementation vs. Transformation – A scheduling project is more than implementing a system. It is about transforming the way your scheduling processes flow, and the system is just a supporting tool in that transformation.
- Structuring Cross-Departmental Teams – There many similarities to a clinical system implementation. Payroll, HR, and IT are all stakeholders, but it should be owned by Nursing, as staff operations are the key focus.
- Change Management and Leadership – Scheduling implementations bring change that is difficult to accept at the user level. Change management strategies and strong leadership should be leveraged to facilitate adoption.
- Maximizing The System Solution – The system design should take advantage of the software’s strengths. Focusing on workarounds to gaps with recreating the legacy processes will bog down the project and frustrate everyone, while ultimately resulting in a flawed solution.
That puts us right in the heart of design strategies. What we have coming next takes us out of that neighborhood and on to key concepts around user acceptance and the project completion. As you have been following along this roadmap so far, have there been any critical points that have jumped out at you as crucial bits of knowledge? Are there any highlights so far from the above topics that you want to call out? Feel free to email me or put your thoughts in the comments section below. I’m looking forward to hearing from you on this roadmap and am very excited about where we are going next! Glad to have you along for the journey!
By the way, the HIMSS conference is coming up this month in Orlando. If you or someone from your hospital/health system is attending, we’d love to have you stop by our booth – #3582. I will be there and would be delighted to talk with you about this healthcare scheduling implementation roadmap series or anything else about workforce management in healthcare that you have on your mind. Additionally we will have copies of our new white paper for you to pick up, the “Healthcare Productivity Balancing Act“. I’ll be following that up with a webinar in March. Stay tuned for details on how you can sign up for that. See you there!