Employee Scheduling Software

Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital Simplifies Scheduling with VSS Pro

“Now all directors and supervisors have the ability to look in one place for the information they need, saving them time and aggravation.” 

George D. Velianoff, PhD, RN, FACHE, Chief Nursing Officer

Customer Profile

Founded in 1990, Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital provides mental health and addictions treatment, including inpatient, partial hospitalization, and outpatient services in the Chicago area. With 130 beds, Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital is one of the busiest behavioral healthcare facilities in the state of Illinois.

Situation/Challenge

For the Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital, the process of manually generating equitable schedules for a staff of over 300 nurses had become cumbersome. The scheduling coordinator was spending more than 5 hours each week just to create a schedule that would combine individual unit schedules into one master schedule. In addition, finding staff that could perform a specific task was very challenging, as the scheduler had to inherently know staff’s qualifications in order to properly staff each shift. In order to achieve better staffing effectiveness and provide a faster and easier way to turn scheduling information into meaningful reports, Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital needed to take their scheduling processes to the next level. The hospital decided to replace cumbersome and error-prone “pencil-and-paper” they turned to a software company known for offering easy-to-use and affordable scheduling software – Atlas Business Solutions (ABS). Within a month from requesting information, the decision team positively evaluated the software capabilities and decided to purchase Visual Staff Scheduler Pro (VSS Pro). The software implementation and internal training was completed in less than a week, giving staff schedulers the tool so needed. “I like how simple, yet very powerful, a scheduling solution can be,” says Lisa Torres, Staffing Coordinator at Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital.

Solution

VSS Pro scheduling software proved to be the right cure for Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital’s scheduling headaches. After the initial set up, which included defining shifts, identifying reasons for time off, and inputting nurses’ skills and certifications, the staff coordinator can now produce specific schedules to display scheduling information in the desired way. “I like how easy it is to create any type of group schedules. It used to take me the whole hour to prepare a daily shift schedule for the hospital. Now it’s ready to print in just a few mouse clicks,” adds Torres. Another area of scheduling, improved with the use of VSS Pro scheduling software, was the ability to find immediately qualified nurses for open shifts. “Now I can see at a glance, which nurse can perform specific tasks, like translating into Spanish, so I can quickly assign an appropriate person,” Torres adds. Using VSS Pro also helps Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital to respond instantly and effortlessly to any reporting requests, as all scheduling information is transparent and easy to retrieve. According to Torres, prior to using VSS Pro scheduling software, she had to manually combine information from several schedule sheets, making it very time consuming. “Now, the reports are formatted to the desired layout and ready to print in seconds,” Torres explains. In addition to improving staff effectiveness, Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital also improved internal communication. “Now all directors and supervisors have the ability to look in one place for the information they need, saving them time and aggravation,” says George D. Velianoff, PhD, RN, FACHE, Chief Nursing Officer.

Benefits

Since implementing VSS Pro software, Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital reduced the amount of time it takes to create schedules and generate requested reports by two-thirds. According to Velianoff, using VSS Pro scheduling software has allowed more time for staffing coordinators to do other tasks and projects rather than copying schedules by hand. “VSS Pro scheduling tool makes my job extremely efficient. It was the best choice we could make,” Torres concluded.