Release 32: three major new functions

Today we launched Release 32. There is a whole lot to enjoy in this release, but there are three really important and useful ones that we know roster administrators and hospital management will love, that we explain in more detail below.

We cannot promise that every release will be as exciting, useful and powerful as this one. But with 32 releases in 78 weeks you might want to check back regularly to see what’s next.

New template management functions

When we launched the all-new HosPortal V2 last year we rebuilt the way that templates and repeating cycles are managed. Far more powerful but - apparently - a little frustrating to manage. So we thought hard about how to keep all the power but with more visual feedback and more intuitive editing functions, and make it more in line with the powerful functions administrators already have access to.

We were also able to share a beta version with all our roster administrators, many of whom provided feedback….mostly along the lines of ‘we love it!’. So we are delighted to have polished it up now to make it available as standard feature to all our users.

You can see the brief we sent all our customers here.

Team-based permissions

At many hospitals, particularly medicine departments, sub-speciality clinical areas are managed by senior consultants who look after a number of trainee physicians. So our customers want easy ways for consultants to manage rosters and staff leave only within their own team, and prohibit - for instance - the neurology consultant from editing the cardiology rosters or the general medicine consultant approving leave for a trainee who will be in the nephrology team at that time.

Now you can. By using HosPortal’s existing team function you can now create a permission to allow certain individuals to manage their own team. So all Consultants can be given a single, simple and intuitive permission, and it allows a Consultant in the Neurology team permissions only over others in the same Neurology team.

Manage rules and conflicts by tag

Shift conflict rules and work rules can now work on roster tags. Until now, making rules that covered a mix of rosters was time-consuming, and required some care. Now you can create a single simple rule that will apply to multiple rosters, and you can decide what rosters are affected by the rule by applying or removing a tag. So you might create a single rule that says that someone on a night shift cannot do a day shift the next day. You would then create a ‘night shift’ tag and apply it to all the relevant overnight rosters.