Rules

Your schedule rules are the heart of your schedule creation process, and of course the heart of Schedule-Tools. It is not unusual for an anesthesiology practice to have 15 to 30 schedule rules that you use when you create your monthly schedule. Schedule-Tools has a powerful and flexible schedule engine that can use most any rule that your practice is likely to have.

Broadly speaking Schedule-Tools uses three types of rules, required rules, weighted rules, and history related rules. Required rules are rules that must be observed in all applicable scheduled tasks. Weighted rules are use to select rank the desirability of an anesthesiologist to fill a given position.

Required Rule: An example of a required rule would be that first call on day one must be last call on day two. This rule would be evaluated each time a task (call position/date/location) is evaluated for scheduling. If a required rule would be broken, the particular anesthesiologist being evaluated for the task being scheduled would be ruled out and the next most desirable anesthesiologist available would be evaluated in turn until a staff member can be scheduled without breaking a rule.

Weighted Rule: Weighted rules are typically used to balance the amount of each task that a staff member has during the schedule creation process. For example, if there are 22 weekdays in a month and there are 7 staff members in the pool serving this location this month, ideally each staff member should have three first calls, 3 second calls, etc. The Schedule-Tools schedule engine management pages will allow you to specify how important this rule is in comparison to other weighted rules on the fly. Anesthesiologists are presented to the schedule engine in the order of the sum of all the weighted rules so that it is most likely that the most desirable staff member for that task will get it unless eliminated by a required rule.

Historical Weighted Rules: To produce a fair and equitable schedule month after month, the Schedule-Tools schedule enigine evaluates historical task assignments while creating the schedule. Normally a year or more of historical data is used to rank anesthesiologists when scheduling. During the schedule creation process all tasks in the history window you have chosen are evaluated and normalized to account for start dates and full time equivalencies. This data is used in two ways. First it is used to build the staff pools used to serve a location during a month. Second, as the schedule is being created historical data is combined with weighted data for the portion of the month being scheduled to rank your staff for each task. You also have the ability to limit the amount of high calls that can be boosted to bring someone who is low up to normal. This eliminates the case where someone who may be way behind from your old schedules trying to catch up in a single month.

In addition to the basic rule types above, Schedule-Tools will look at total tasks per site, total call 1, 2, 3, etc. per location, and even Monday call 1 at location A, Tuesday call 1 at location A, etc. This would be impossible to do manually for most practices.

Schedule-Tools also enables you to combine weighted and historical weighted rules into a formula with ratios that you may adjust. Therefore you can combine several rules into a single weight and adjust the importance of each, run a schedule, and if you like, rerun the schedule with a different ratio to see if a more desirable schedule is created.

Schedule-Tools staff will take the rules that you have for your practice and code them into the schedule engine for you, give you the tools to adjust weightings, and produce the reports that let the schedule administrator, and your staff to have confidence in the fairness and equity of the schedule.