Why HosPortal?

Create repeating templates and patterns over any period (4 weeks, 7 weeks…), and plan for future patterns and changes starting from any date in the future.

Once staffing patterns and templates are built (which we assist with as part of the setup phase) publish a complex multi-week roster in minutes.

Use pattern-based rostering to apply a user to multi-week staffing patterns with a click.

Use term-based rostering to cycle trainees through standard training terms with a few clicks.

Quickly and easily review and edit staff activity: track the impact of leave in real time; find gaps in allocations and rosters; determine who is available to be staffed today; filter staff and VMOs by skills and team membership to find the best person to fill a vacancy.

Review activity statistics to check for balance/fairness and compliance with minimum obligations.

Let HosPortal take care of all the communication with staff: send roster updates and changes, send reminders, track whether users have acknowledged their shifts, and send real-time updates if there are urgent and short-dated changes (such as an SMS message if shifts are changed less than 3 hours before a start time).

With appropriate rules in place, completely automate the process of managing activity swaps or transfers. No admin personnel need to be involved… however, they can still maintain oversight and awareness of changes.

Use the roster ‘market’, with flexible rules you manage, to alert doctors about additional staffing opportunities or vacant shifts.

Automatically track short-notice sick leave, generate alerts if someone calls in sick, and then quickly rebalance the roster with available staff.

Reduce the load on core roster administrators: share roster, staff and leave management across multiple staff with sophisticated permission options.

When using our self-roster and preference-gathering features the effort in building, publishing and maintaining rosters can be reduced even further, to as little as a few hours per year:

Once quotas are determined, let HosPortal manage the entire roster-building process: invite people to participate, collect their preferences, fill vacant shifts, build draft rosters using our automated algorithm, track compliance against shift quotas and expectations, manage roster rules, and advise everyone of their final assignments.

Use sophisticated points systems to entice people to pick hard-to-fill shifts, e.g. double the weight of school holidays, add additional weight to Christmas and New Year public holidays.

Use HosPortal to manage shift swaps and transfers, eliminating the need for administrator intervention.

Rely on our change logs and communications audit tools to maximise users’ accountability for their shifts.

Eliminate altogether double-handling of data such as collating shift preferences, translating from surveys and emails into a useable format, checking rules and shift counts, and coordinating shifts between multiple rosters.here

See on-screen and real-time statistical reporting; use detailed spreadsheet exports to allow more complex analysis. Use this analysis to report on and then reduce overtime, cancelled sessions, under-utilised sessions and extra ad hoc sessions required to meet excess work.

Every roster screen is configurable. Save different views and filters to quickly change between preferred settings, or to recall views that improve your efficiency when editing rosters.

Use the secure document storage library to give users quick and easy access from any device in any location. Share access to training material, reference manuals, policies and procedures.

Automate leave approval workflow. Automatically approve or deny leave based on sophisticated rules to reduce work for the leave approvers; collate leave requests into a single management screen that provides approvers with all the information they need to make leave decisions.

Send email or SMS messages to any or all accredited users, for instance for clinical call-backs. Filter users by the rosters they are on, or their role in your facility.

Set up subscription contact lists, to allow people to get only those messages of interest to them, increasing the likely response rate.

Manage events, agendas, minutes and attendees all in one place.

Add and remove very fine-grained permissions over any part of HosPortal’s functions and users using our simple, transparent and powerful permission management system.

In addition to the efficiency gains, health facilities can reduce clinical and operational risks, too.

Rosters are immediately updated and available to all user, and can be sent in PDF by email automatically to the switchboard or other people who need to know who are not HosPortal users.

Define and manage flexible shift conflict rules (e.g. can’t do days after night shifts) and over-working rules (e.g. no more than 80 hours per fortnight; no consecutive weekends)

Immediately see where staff have been rostered in conflict with the roster rules, or when they are on leave. Set rules to prevent overworking.

Filter and sort all vacant shifts. Send alerts to roster administrators at any time before a vacant shift to ensure these are filled promptly.

Use auto-fill functions to fill vacant shifts with people who have not met their quota obligations.

On any mobile device you can call, text or email any other user directly from your device. Speed up call-backs and critical communications.

Create alerts to notify administrators when another roster administrator overrides the rostering rules.

Reduce key-person risk with roster administrators. HosPortal creates records of rules and structures that allow quick and easy handover to new personnel, either when your normal roster administrators are on leave or when there is a permanent change. HosPortal support staff are available to support any transition. Many manual tasks are eliminated, reducing the training load on new staff and making it easier to find volunteers to assist with rostering.

Keep records of all staffing changes and all communications, to review at any time in the future. Use HosPortal records and shift audit records to assist with incident analysis.

All data is stored and backed up reliably using globally-recognised data storage services.

Reduce key person risk: HosPortal help is available to all roster administrators and can train up your new team members.

In addition to the benefits our healthcare customers receive, all our users benefit too, whether they be trainees or consultants, employees, VMOs, locums or contractors:

See real-time updates synchronised across any phone, laptop or other devices, from any location.

See all activities across multiple hospitals in one place with a single login. Reduce the opportunity for conflicts and the need to rebalance shifts.

Pick your shifts with a few clicks from any device, in seconds. HosPortal looks after your quotas and fair allocations.

Manage swaps and transfers with a click. HosPortal manages compliance with rostering rules.

Use the market to find people to take or swap your shift. Offer incentives for people to take your shifts.

Automate invoicing and billing for private on-call hours. Review the status of invoices.

Link HosPortal data to your external calendars, such as Outlook, Google, iOS and Android calendars using iCal.

Get shift reminders, and get real-time alerts when shifts change.

Subscribe to the messages and data feeds you want to see; unsubscribe from the ones you don’t. A roster administrator can always override your preferences in an emergency.

HosPortal has a robust approach to protecting our services and customer data. Please get in touch and we would be delighted to talk about our technical underpinnings and our approaches to privacy and cybersecurity.

HosPortal has a dedicated customer-facing support team right here in Australia, supported by live chat and - for new customers - phone and videoconference support at times that suit you.

We are proud of our rapid response time to customers, roster administrators and end users.

Our training responds to your needs: we will train you on the things you need regularly, but we will do for you things that you don’t.

HosPortal’s business is based on making sure we listen to customers - and potential customers - and we regularly enhance our functions and services in response to their feedback.

Our design philosophy puts power into the hands of our customers. New or changed rules, rosters, settings and even features do not require contact with HosPortal at all...but we are there to assist if you want.

If we do need to amend our features, our investment some years ago in the most flexible and powerful software allows us to make changes quickly, and all changes are supervised by our customer-facing team who understand our customers and know what they want from their software.

HosPortal has been in use for over 15 years as a specialist medical rostering provider and now serves over 70 customers in Australia and New Zealand.

Our customer support and software development teams are all permanent employees and have deep expertise in medical rostering.

HosPortal users can select shifts, express preferences and show when they are not available.

HosPortal’s powerful automated roster-building process can then use these, leave data and our powerful work rules to create draft rosters in seconds.

Review statistics and tweak the roster before publishing.

HosPortal provides real-time on-screen data on activity statistics and compliance with roster requirements. Our comprehensive administrative dashboards can immediately highlight vacant shifts and assignments that break shift conflict rules.

HosPortal allows you to create a library of standardised reports.

Once created, these reports can be generated automatically over any date range. Some can be sent on a repeating automated schedule to any email address.

Mistakes happen, but transparency should never be compromised. Our robust audit trail ensures that every swap and change is accounted for, promoting trust and accountability within your team.

If you allow users to swap and transfer shifts, there will never be uncertainty about how a person ended up on a shift: see the complete audit trail on every shift; see all the email and SMS correspondence to any user, including shift reminders, and see whether the emails were read.

With HosPortal, you can see your entire roster landscape in one glance. Or just focus on a small part: select just some clinical activities or a handful of locations. See activity by roster, person or location…or cycle through these with a click.

Create a library of standard views that you can call up at any time.

No more toggling between screens or managing multiple spreadsheets – just a clear, concise view of who's on call and where your resources are allocated.

HosPortal believes users need the ability to see, in real-time, changes that relate to their work schedule, and some activities need automated alerts (e.g. send an SMS if someone’s shift changes within an hour of start).

HosPortal even has a display mode suited to corridor monitors that updates in real time as others make changes on other devices.

After a complete rebuild that was launched in 2022, HosPortal has made over 10 enhancements per week, reflecting customers feedback and our strategy to continue to lead the market in medical rostering.

As a cloud-based service, all updates are immediately available to all of HosPortal’s customers and are always included in the price.