Over time, have the users changed too? Do different types of healthcare professionals now access scheduling applications?
As computers have become more readily accessible with the advent of networking technology and decreasing hardware costs, more and more organizations are realizing the benefits of computerized employee and patient scheduling applications. These systems are no longer limited to the nursing or surgery department. Centralized scheduling is becoming the one-stop shop for all appointment and resource scheduling throughout entire healthcare organizations. Surgeons are on-line viewing their upcoming surgery schedule and booking their own cases into pre-defined blocks of time. Even support departments, like dietary and environmental services, are scheduling their employees in the same system once dedicated only to nursing. Q: What have been some of the most difficult hurdles in implementing scheduling systems? A: As with any system of this magnitude, there are now so many features available to the user that many systems are often underutilized. I call this the word processor syndrome. While mos
