simplinic offers hospitals a new type of shift planning tool to deploy scarce personnel resources in line with demand. The fluctuating demand for service and logistics services over the course of the week and the required service level are taken into account. Mathematical methods are used to calculate the ideal shift plan down to the hour. "The demographic challenge is forcing hospitals to do more with fewer staff. Conventional static shift plans don't help, but instead create over- and under-utilization," says Steffen Geyer, founder and CEO of simplinic. Service and logistics managers can use the new tool not only to make optimum use of available staff, but also to react to staff changes in just a few minutes and communicate them to the entire company. In times of high sickness rates and vacancies, short-term resource adjustments have become an everyday challenge in many clinics.
The data basis for the new shift planner is a wide range of software tools for the digital order management of all service and logistics processes. Daily and weekly volumes and relevant process data, such as processing times and punctuality, are recorded. While simplinic previously evaluated this data on request, customers can now carry out this mathematical modeling independently in the simplinic software. Optimized shift plans are automatically integrated into the service and logistics processes so that requesting departments, such as stations or functional areas, can see live whether there are service bottlenecks or not before an order is created. The automatic modeling of service quality shows live whether the planned service level, such as punctuality, can be met or not. "Staff shortages have long been a reality," says Steffen Geyer, founder and CEO of simplinic, "our customers need tools to get more done with fewer available staff."
The challenge for staff scheduling is the combination of ad-hoc tasks with recurring tasks and enormous fluctuations in demand over the course of the day and week. As a result, many shift plans in practice rarely reflect actual demand, which means that staff are either barely able to cover peak times or are not utilized productively when they are idle. Persistent waves of illness and vacancies exacerbate the problem: if available staff are not optimally utilized, it is almost impossible to ensure a seamless treatment chain with a short length of stay.
Smaller hospitals benefit in particular from staff pools in the service area. Both ad-hoc tasks and recurring tasks can be combined in a meaningful way and played out digitally in simplinic tools. This optimized capacity utilization is only possible with live data; previous shift plans based on historical tally lists only allow a rough and rigid orientation of requirements. This analog planning is unsuitable as a means of combating staff shortages.
The functional scope of the new shift planner includes fast creation of new shifts by "drag and drop", daily updated shift plan adjustments in case of illness with one click, modeling of the service level on the basis of adapted shift plans, any versioning and activation of shift plans, processing of any historical request data from all simplinic modules and also from external systems for analysis purposes, overview of planned resources of all processes and live transparency of available resources for all users in the company.
