What is Auto Schedule?
Auto Scheduler is a feature within Civica Scheduling which intelligently e-schedules caseloads, matching clinical skill with patient needs, optimise schedules and route planning.
What does it do?
- Automatically assigns caseloads based on defined rules such as clinical skill, patient need, location and visit duration.
- Easily schedule planned and unplanned visits, with real-time visibility for managers across all teams.
- Optimise clinician schedules and route plans, with protected lunch, break and travel times.
- Seamlessly integrates with your existing EPR system.
How does it work?
To allow this feature to work at its optimal behaviour, we need to ensure the correct information is checked for.
Below is a list of the different aspects taken into consideration when the auto-schedule is scheduling visits at its best:
- Manually allocated visits - If a visit has been manually allocated prior to running the auto-schedule, Civica Scheduling will keep this out of the Auto Scheduler.
- Time Sensitive Services - e.g., needs to be done at a certain time and therefore will take priority. Examples of this would be Insulin visits or any “All hands meetings” i.e., lunch/handover/admin etc - Civica Scheduling recognises that some events are internal and fixed to a set time for all (or groups of) staff.
- Default Staff – Sometimes used for continuity of care. If a default staff has been set to visit/s, the Auto-Scheduler will look to find these and match the default staff with the visits. This is under the condition that the staff is available, free, trained etc.
- Double up visits – Some visits that may require a double up of staff may have x2 trained or x1 trained and one non-trained - depending on configuration of service and rules set, you can either have x2 trained or 1 trained and 1 untrained to attend a visit with that service.
- Clinical contact time – Each team/group will have a maximum number of contact minutes set in the background, the auto-schedule will not exceed this.
- Staff Competencies - Ensures that visits are only allocated to staff that are trained to do that intervention. If a visit has multiple interventions, then that staff member has to be trained in ALL.
- Incompatibilities - If you have any incompatibilities set, the Auto-scheduler looks for this and makes sure that the visit is allocated to another staff member.
- Availability - Availabilities are the shift hours each staff member works per day. Visits will be allocated within these available times for those staff on shift.
- Traits - All patient traits must match those of the staff, not just one.
- Travel - Travel time is incorporated in between visits. Additional settings can also be applied to add a set amount of additional travel time on top of the calculated travel time.
- Allocation priority - Priorities can be set to each staff member (Tier 1 - High priority allocation down to Tier 5 - Low priority allocation). Please note that visits are not shared out evenly, it will instead utilise those staff required to complete the visits.
- Start Location – Whether the postcode is from a staff’s home postcode or office postcode it will pick the closest postcode visit as the first visit (it does not include travel time to the first visit)
- Clinical priority - This field is location on the interventions and the Autoscheduler will allocate High Priority visits first, then Medium then low priority visits
Routing
After visits have been allocated to staff members, routing is run. Routing tries to minimise completion time which is defined as the time from starting to ending the route. It therefore includes travel time, event duration and time waiting between events (needed for time sensitive events). The exception to this is if a user has more than one period of availability in a day.
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