How to Build Better ED Physician Schedules 

Unsurprisingly, the ED operates in a constant state of change. ED clinicians must be prepared for anything to meet rapidly changing patient demands. 

That’s why physician schedules for emergency departments can be complex to manage. Even so, ED schedules are often built manually, resulting in less-than-satisfactory results for patients, physicians, administrators, and leaders trying to maintain business health. 

Let’s explore why ED schedules are so complex and how to fix these issues early before they snowball into bigger problems. 

Emergency Department Scheduling Issues

The complexities of ED scheduling are caused by a few factors, all of which make manual scheduling practices that much more challenging:  

1. Increasing patient volumes and varying acuity: ED visits have increased since the 1990s due to many factors, including the needs of aging baby boomers.¹ This high volume and the unpredictability of emergency situations make scheduling physicians a complicated balancing act.
2. Changing staffing needs and resources: The ED never closes, so to keep the ER running smoothly, there needs to be a constant supply of unlimited resources—most importantly, clinicians. EDs may rely heavily on locum tenens physicians and moonlighters to bridge the gap, but this drives up operational costs.
3. Clinician overload and burnout: Clinicians—and really the entire care team—are constantly exposed to a high-stress environment with long hours. In part because physicians working in emergency medicine are among the most at risk for burnout,_² administrators are challenged to provide ED physicians with adequate rest time between grueling shifts and to manage on-call schedules equitably.

How to Fix Emergency Department Schedules 

Fixing emergency department schedules isn’t as simple as ensuring enough providers are available to care for every patient who walks through the door. Other elements, including the number of rooms available and more granular provider preferences, must also be considered to keep everything running smoothly. 

Technology is the only match for the complexity inherent to ED clinician scheduling—there are just too many variables for an administrator or even basic scheduling software to manage efficiently. That’s because technology (specifically, technology built on powerful algorithms like combinatorial optimization) can flexibly respond to the many changes that occur in the fast-paced ED. Even before a shift is worked, combinatorial optimization can produce a schedule that maximizes the use of your resources (mainly, your clinicians) to best meet the needs of patients. 

To fix the ED schedule, leverage technology that can build a gapless schedule based on the needs of your ER’s unique operational capacity, staffing levels, organizational needs, and more. Beyond just building a better schedule, technology can optimize your ED shifts to land on the best schedule. Never settle for something that merely seems “good enough.” 

How Technology Improves Emergency Department Schedules

We hear the advice to “just utilize technology” so often that it sometimes falls on deaf ears. Healthcare scheduling technology can drastically improve emergency department schedules by:  

• Increasing shift equity  
• Balancing clinician supply and patient demand  
• Accommodating unique clinician preferences with scheduling rules 
• Reducing workload where possible 
• Automating the schedule building process for schedulers 
• Balancing bedside and administrative time 
• Providing better data for long-term workforce management 

Benefits of Emergency Department Scheduling Software

With technology optimizing your clinician schedules, other benefits are sure to follow. These may include: 

1. Improved patient safety: Optimized schedules guarantee there will be enough clinicians and staff on call to handle different levels of demand, ensuring patients always receive the level of care and attention they deserve.  
2. Increased resource utilization: Before immediately turning to expensive third-party assistance to fill staffing gaps, scheduling software can revamp the way existing staff are scheduled and organized. This can help your organization more accurately align staff and other resources like rooms and equipment with fluctuating patient demand. 
3. Better work-life balance: Scheduling software can help safeguard physician well-being. This may involve setting up a rule, for example, that requires a certain amount of time to pass between long or difficult shifts. It can also automatically equalize on-call shifts, grant time off, and approve shift-swap requests. All of this can help to improve clinician retention.

How To Optimize Emergency Department Schedules

There are thousands of ways your emergency department schedule can be optimized—you just need powerful healthcare scheduling software like Lightning Bolt to uncover them. 

Check out our in-depth scheduling guide for operational leaders to get a deeper understanding of the positive impact scheduling software can have on your health system.

Sources:

1. Trends in Hospital Emergency Department Visits by Age and Payer, 2006-2015, Agency for Healthcare Research and Policy: https://hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb238-Emergency-Department-Age-Payer-2006-2015.jsp
2. ‘I Cry but No One Cares’: Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2023, MedScape: https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2023-lifestyle-burnout-6016058?faf=1