When Dr Rob Horvath made the switch from family physician
to ER doctor at Toronto's North York General Hospital
(NYGH), fixing leaks in the physician roster system wasn't
exactly top of his agenda. But after using the hospital's
old fashioned paper-based scheduling system, his priorities
changed pretty quickly.
PENCILLED-IN
CHAOS
Dr Horvath grew increasingly frustrated with the amount
of time he had to devote to managing his schedule. "If
I had five or six shifts in one week, think of how many
docs I had to call if I wanted to trade them," he says,
adding that the complexity of the system often led to
chaos. "Shifts were occasionally forgotten, or there
was confusion as to who was required to work or who
was on second call," he says. Not to mention the fact
that schedules had to be printed, photocopied, distributed
and updated. Doctors and administrators had to make
any corrections manually, with white out and erasers;
not surprisingly the result was often inaccurate and
out-of-date.
Dr Horvath enlisted the help of
his colleague Dr Sev Perelman and the two set out to
reinvent the wheel. In 2001 DocRoster was born. The
program is a web-based schedule management system that
organizes physician rosters and on-call schedules. Since
its launch, DocRoster has quickly gained the approval
of physicians working on the hospital frontlines. A
pilot project was run for a year at NYGH, and physicians
voted overwhelmingly in favour of keeping the software
and using it exclusively for their scheduling.
THUMBS
UP FROM DOCS
"DocRoster has been highly valuable to our group of
emergency physicians," enthuses Dr Tim Rutledge, Director
of the Emergency Services program at NYGH. "Scheduling
over 30 doctors in two sites is a complex task and DocRoster
has greatly improved the efficiency of this process."
Doctors can also view master schedules
of all sites from any location and at any time by simply
going on the net and logging on to the DocRoster site.
They can also be notified of shift trades by email,
and even synchronize personal schedules with Palm/Pocket
PC handhelds. They can accept or reject offers and proposals
from other doctors online — a very popular feature.
"The ability to post shifts for trade or giveaway is
very user-friendly," says Dr Rutledge.
VERSATILE
AND FLEXIBLE
Hospital administrators are also benefiting from the
technology upgrade. Besides posting schedules, they
can also use DocRoster to audit the history of all trades
and changes for any shift, so they can see where there
are gaps and where they could improve the planning for
future shifts. "It really is marvellous," says Virginia
Fletcher, Executive Assistant at NYGH's Department of
Emergency Medicine. She's been using DocRoster for over
three years and says that it's increased the department's
efficiency considerably. "It saves time for all of us,
it's accessible to everyone and it's always up to date."
There are currently 12 hospitals
and several urgent care clinics in Canada using the
system, including the two divisions of North York General
Hospital, the three divisions of William Osler Hospital,
Hospital for Sick Children, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto
East General, the two divisions of Humber River Regional
Hospital, York Central Hospital and Markham Stouffville
Hospital.
To learn more about DocRoster,
visit www.rosterware.com
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