Summary

A long-term and respite care facility for those 18 years and older in London, located in southwestern Ontario,
was looking to automate callouts to cover nursing shifts in the scheduling department. This facility selected Automated Shift Fill (ASF), a module within Vocantas Communicate™. Automated Shift Fill is a two-way interactive system using text, voice, email and app to find relief for open shifts.

Background

London is one of the largest urban municipalities in Ontario and is a regional centre of healthcare and education. The city’s population currently stands at 383,822. The long-term and respite care facility serves as a resource to the community, offering services such as rehabilitation, residential care, supportive housing and ambulatory programs.

The facility teamed up with Ontario-based Vocantas to source a solution to automate the manual callouts to cover nursing shifts in the scheduling department.

Problem

The organization was looking for a cloud-based solution to effectively automate callouts to cover shifts in seconds using employees’ preferred method of communication. The suitable solution needed to offer communication methods such as text, phone and emails. In addition, the proposed solution needed to be able to broadcast to approximately 350 staff members within the organization and replace the numerous outbound calls.

Solution

The Canadian-based organization teamed up with Vocantas because Automated Shift Fill provided the facility efficient and effective tools to fill open shifts. The power of Automated Shift Fill provides the scheduling office with the automated communication tools needed to efficiently and effectively fill open shifts.

Automated Shift Fill met and even exceeded all of the organizations’ requirements. Schedulers save labor expenses and improve morale using the system. Staff are offered and can bid on open shifts via interactive text, phone and email. The Employee Portal enables employees to select preferred time windows for receiving shift offers on each day of the week and employees can opt out of shift offers for the day or select whether they would like to be notified if they were awarded the shift. Every activity performed by a user is timestamped whether it is an employee making a change or accepting a shift to a scheduler sending a callout. All this information is available in real-time reports that can be easily accessed and exported. The module provides acceptable response times for staff to consider shift acceptance. A priority window is a period of time during which expressions of interest for a shift are guaranteed to be considered. At the end of a shift offer’s priority window, ASF will compare all expressions of interest received for the shift and recommend who should be awarded based on organizational rules.

Benefits

The beauty of Automated Shift Fill is no more painstaking manual phone calls. Other features of Automated Shift Fill include:

• Real-time interactive responses
• Details of each interaction are saved for report and auditing purposes
• Integration with existing scheduling software (standalone version also available)
• Staff manages their own preferences in the secure web portal
• Call display will show that your organization is calling
• Highly configurable to meet the needs of any scheduling environment
• The system operates 24/7
• Overtime costs reduced
• Grievances reduced – shifts distributed according to collective agreement

Vocantas provided a successful  implementation  and start up. This improved our staff engagement.”