Thinking about dates and times

When you run a rostering software business you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to represent dates, times and repeating cycles. We spent a huge amount of time on this before we wrote even our first line of code for the new version of HosPortal some years ago. Some things we got very right, but one thing we got slightly wrong that we have now fixed.

Some of the many things we got right include:

Native multi-time-zone format. All hospitals live in one time-zone, but we actually have customers that think in multiple time-zones. A radiology practice has radiologists in Australia, UK and elsewhere. They want the ability to build and manage their rosters in one time-zone, but for each of their users to be able to see their own rosters in their local time-zone. Easy.

Native daylight savings calculations. If you define an overnight shift to be, say, 6pm to 6am, it is sometimes important to be able to calculate that the shift duration is 13 hours long when the clocks change in Autumn and 11 hours long when the clocks change in Spring (‘Spring forward, fall back’). We get this right every time.

Complex repeating cycles. Not only can we do what we’d assume all rostering software can do in specifying (if you want) that each of the 7 days of the week and public holidays have different shift times. We can also specify (as a recent customer asked) that if a public holiday falls on a Monday that the attached Saturday and Sunday are treated like holiday days, too. Or that if a public holiday falls on a Thursday then the Friday shift in that week has a different start time.

One thing we got slightly wrong and have now fixed is how to specify repeating cycles.

It used to be that if you wanted to specify a cycle of activity that repeated every second Wednesday, you needed define the cycle by specifying the exact starting Wednesday, e.g. Wednesday 5 June. This was frustrating for many users, and for us too. Most people think of that cycle being ‘it happens every second Wednesday, but it starts in the week of Monday 3 June’ or ‘it will start from the first Wednesday after June 1st’. So now, as of Release 43, we have changed our approach: you can now specify the start date for a cycle to be at any time on or before its first occurrence and HosPortal will do the thinking for you to make sure it works as you intend.