Yale University’s Department of Emergency Medicine Turns to Humanity For Staff Scheduling

The dedicated and hardworking staff at Yale University School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine treat the full spectrum of patients using skills ranging from those of a general practitioner to specialists. They diagnose emergency conditions and undertake acute interventions to stabilize the patient. Some of their many skills include trauma resuscitation, advanced cardiac life support, advanced airway management, assisting women in labor and management of drug overdoses. This department was created in 1991 and has grown from five employees to 47, who are collectively responsible for over 100,000 patient visits a year.

They recruit patients for multiple research studies from the Emergency Department at Yale University. In order to maximize the number of patients that are recruited and in line with their commitment to service, they offer 24/7 coverage. Shifts are filled with both students and full-time employees in order to ensure that all hours of the day, and week, are covered. Balancing student schedules and availability with full-time staff can get complicated, particularly when unexpected issues or deadlines arise for students. Scheduling when student staff is involved can become overwhelming during exam times and sparse during holidays, which adds pressure to management staff who want appropriate staff available to cover all the services they offer. On top of juggling dynamic and ever-changing student schedules, offering 24/7 staff coverage adds an entirely new element to the staff scheduling process.

Before Yale’s Department of Emergency Medicine switched to Humanity, they were using a calendar on Microsoft Word that stored information on a dropbox account that everyone could access. Unfortunately, this created problems when people tried to open and view shifts, and pick them up. Multiple copies of the single calendar would be created, leading to mass confusion.

Humanity has made staff scheduling immensely easier for them, as the students are now able to directly trade shifts with one another, without having to involve management staff. Additionally, the ability to create open shifts and have employees volunteer or pick up the open shifts based on their own availability, streamlines the staff scheduling process. By allowing them to take part in the scheduling process, management staff minimizes the need to make additional changes to the staff schedule before it is finalized. Humanity’s integrated workforce management and staff scheduling application has solved many of their previous staff scheduling problems. Communication between employees is seamless and efficient, and the Humanity application can be accessed from anywhere, at anytime – a useful tool for staff members on a college campus.

They have found the live help and customer support particularly helpful as it saves a tremendous amount of time. Instead of spending time searching for answers or trying to figure out how to use a feature, the staff at Yale’s Department of Emergency Medicine have found it much easier and less time consuming to ask the Humanity support staff, who also work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.