May 21, 2008 – RES-Q Healthcare Systems today introduced the RES-Q Labor Resource Management 10.0, the new release of its staffing and scheduling system for hospitals.
The new software will help hospitals in “dialing for hours,” a term hospital staffing managers use that describes the scramble that ensues when they have to fill open shifts in nursing schedules. The staffing office makes one phone call after another until they reach nurses willing to take shifts. This process is tedious, time-consuming and inefficient. Staffing offices can now broadcast open shift notifications via internal messages to employees’ RES-Q system mailboxes, e-mails to personal e-mail accounts, text messages to cell phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs), and/or voice messages to designated phone numbers.
Staffing managers, for example, can create a request and with the text-to-voice function broadcast it to the phone numbers of all the nurses they are trying to reach to fill a specific shift. The response voice messages enable employees to press “1” to accept or “2” to decline the shift. Nurses who accept shifts can be scheduled directly from the RES-Q system’s Call Log. The system then calls scheduled nurses to confirm the shifts they are working. All others receive automated messages to inform them that the shift has been filled.
In Communications Preferences, managers can select one or more message options for specific types of notifications. One nurse may not want calls to her home phone number for shift pick-up requests, and she prefers that such calls go to her cell phone at least 45 minutes before the shift begins. Another may want such requests delivered as text messages to his PDA with 30 minutes advance notice. Their individual preferences can be noted, stored and remembered in the system.
The new communications functionality supports a variety of messages types. For instance, float notifications inform nurses when they are being floated to a different unit. And the functionality can also be used to manage communications with any employees whose staffing and scheduling are administered with RES-Q Labor Resource Management.
For more information: www.res-q.com
