New leave analysis features
For some time HosPortal has had tools to assist leave administrators decide whether a doctor’s leave can be approved or not. It included things like the usual working days of the doctor, the staff needs on a particular day, and the number of people who are likely to be able to fill various shifts.
But these tools were a bit clunky, and we were aware that the mathematical analysis we presented to leave administrators was a little difficult to explain.
So we have now rebuilt our leave page pretty much from the ground up, and we think it is a significant improvement on the old way. See the screenshot in this post.
A: Improved layout
The leave approval page now separates into 3 tabs the different types of data that make it easier to make a leave decision:
Data about this user: what are their normal working days and template shifts, and what shifts they are already staffed on.
The count of people already with approved leave, where you can select across any role and not just the role of this doctor.
An analysis of the supply of doctors versus the unfilled shifts.
B: Better understanding and insight
The count of leave and the analytics can now consider the impact on other roles. In many hospitals there are activities that could be done by multiple types of people, such as a Consultant, Fellow or Registrar. So granting leave to a Registrar might affect the demand for Consultants or Fellows to fill that gap.
We now also show the impact of leave on different roster groups separately, such as daytime clinical allocations and overnight on-call.
And we allow administrators to consider what happens with as-yet-unpublished shifts: will they go ahead (and therefore require staffing) or will they be cancelled (and therefore free up staff). This makes it easy to assess the impact of leave on activities well into the future, well before administrators have even started to think about the roster.
C: Smarter analysis and simpler conclusions
Our analysis now uses some fancy mathematics and a well-tested theoretical methods to optimise the deployment of the different available roles, skills and teams to see if it possible to fill all the shifts that need staffing. It then reports the results for each session of each day, in one of three statuses:
Orange: balance. It is possible to fill rosters for the chosen role with the available staff.
Green: surplus. After the roster is filled this is the number of people of the chosen role you will have left over.
Red: deficit. After deploying all the staff, this is the number of vacant shifts left over that could be filled with people of the chosen role if they were available.
