Vacation

Schedule-Tools provides a suite of tools for managing, selecting, and accounting for staff vacations in the schedule. Online tools manage and report selected vacation days and allow your staff to chose their vacation days in accordance to your vacation rules. (see example)

Vacation Rules: Your practice may have rules related to the maximum number of staff members who may be on vacation on a given date. In addition you may have limits on the number of staff with specialties who are off on a given day or week. Many practices have rules regarding the minimum and maximum number of vacation days each staff person takes. The good news is that Schedule-Tools will accommodate all of your vacation rules, and allow your staff to chose vacation time on line, without administrative work.

For example, suppose you require all of your staff to take a minimum of 6 weeks of vacation with an additional 2 weeks of optional vacation time. And, you allow your staff to choose 2 weeks of vacation at a time in a round robin order. Schedule-Tools vacation web applications will email each member in turn a vacation "key". The key is a link to the online vacation scheduler that allows the staff member to chose up to 2 weeks of vacation by navigating a monthly calendar page through the vacation year being run.

Each key may be exclusive for a selected number of hours, to give each person a fair opportunity to choose the vacation weeks that they would like. When they view the monthly vacation calendars the vacation rules are applied in real time, this means that the anesthesiologist may only choose weeks that are available due to rules for maximum staff and specialists on vacation, or other rules you have in place.

When a key is "used up" after two weeks of vacation have been selected, the next key is auto issued. This means that vacation scheduling will proceed very quickly, often 3 or more staff members will chose vacation during a single day. If a vacation key is not used during the exclusive period, generally twenty four to forty eight hours, the key remains valid, but the next person gets a key as well so that the process continues to run in a timely fashion. Schedule-Tools allows an unlimited number of active keys.

In many practices, after your staff has selected their base weeks of vacation there may be an "open season" on individual vacation days. Schedule-Tools accommodates this need by enabling your staff to book individual vacation days while still enforcing your staffing level and vacation policies. (see example)

Both during and after vacation days have been chosen staff may view monthly vacation schedules. Many practices also list staff on vacation on the monthly schedules as well for reference.