St. Cloud, MN, September 2, 2003—.

As summer winds down, call schedulers across the country are gearing up once again for call scheduling season. Although some medical groups still do the month to month thing, more and more we see experienced schedulers going with longer scheduling periods. Using longer scheduling periods has many advantages including fewer times per year that a schedule must be created, easier physician and other staff scheduling, allowing scheduling of physician appointments out longer, and less bugging of physicians for vacation dates and other Days Off Call, not to mention less work by the scheduler (me). Many groups schedule a year at a time, usually January 1 to December 31, although Adjuvant’s Call Scheduler allows for scheduling of any time period you want.

Although every scheduler is empowered by their group to a different degree, it’s a good idea at this time to start thinking about sending out a notice to the physicians indicating the approach of call scheduling season and the date deadline for turning in their Days Off Call requests for the next scheduling period (lets assume it’s a year). Also think about a meeting date to review the schedule once it’s published to be sure the group is all in agreement on details. In my group of 23 family practitioners, our annual call schedule meeting used to last a few hours when I had to do the schedule by hand. There was plenty to “discuss”. Now with Call Scheduler-produced schedules (and some careful planning) we are usually finished before everyone is through with their pizza. The Tallies and History of Holiday assignments reports pretty much lay it all out for people to see. Actually by the time we have our pizza meeting, many of the physicians have already reviewed the data online using the Provider Request area of the online program. Thus, the paper reports have become less important, but they are nice to show at the meeting anyway. I usually do our calendar year schedule sometime after Thanksgiving in November, then “publish” it for discussion at a pizza meeting during the first week of December.

If your group still does shorter scheduling periods, keep up the lobby to change to longer call schedule periods. It makes it so much easier for all the reasons mentioned above plus you will spend less time per year in schedule creation mode and just do mostly “maintenance” work approving Days Off and other schedule requests. Since approved schedule changes are automatically incorporated into the schedule immediately, and an e-mail notice goes out to the involved physicians, “maintenance” is a lot like just reading your e-mail and takes very little time. If you already are doing annual schedules, congratulations, this is the best way to go. A helpful hint - if you want to justify assignments for the past 2 or 3 years to be sure of fairness over a longer time, just change the date range of the Tally window to include as many years’ Tally numbers as you care to. Now that we have 23 physicians in our group, we don’t squabble as much about justifying assignments over several years, but I do it anyway since I can still remember when we were 4 physicians, and besides, I still don’t like being on call any more than I have to.

Patrick Zook, M.D.
Adjuvant Technologies, Development Team