5 Risks of allowing your Docs to change their own on-call schedule
There are risks that need to be considered if you are going to allow all of your physicians to have the ability to modify the on-call schedule without any oversight. In my opinion the risks outweigh the benefits.
Risk #1. Fairness. Most all schedulers create the schedule with fairness in mind. All providers demand even tallies. When you allow your providers to modify the schedule fairness needs to be taken into consideration.
Risk #2. Skills and Privileges. Does the provider that you are trading with have the proper skills and credentialing to work your assignment?
Risk #3. Personal Liability. What happens if no one is oncall, when there is supposed to be? Critical patient presents at ED. ED physician evaluates and proceeds to find the on-call consulting physician. No physician found. Patient is transferred to another facility. Patient takes a dive while in transport. Patient dies. EMTALA investigation regarding the transfer. When the legal team at the hospital steps in and finds out that a doctor took himself off of the call schedule because he was tired after a surgery. Guess what happens next?
Risk #4. Too many cooks. Most doctor scheduling software companies have designed their software for a special user called "scheduler", this user has certain privileges in the software that others do not. Some would call this a super-user. Super-users are usually highly trained in the software use. Super-users have the ability to "screw up the program" because of what they can do. The larger the number of super-users in any system, the greater likelihood that someone will accidently screw something up. Real super-users know how to fix their mistakes without having to call tech-support.
Risk #5. Bizarre results. If you are using web-based software by nature you can work in collaboration with someone very easily. At Adjuvant we take advantage of this when we train our Call Scheduler Classic and Lite customers. Both customer and trainer logs into the same account and they can both see the same results. If customer changes something, all the trainer has to do is hit the "refresh" button and the new change is updated. This same principal is true for multiple people to be using the software at the same time, all trying to manually schedule and every time they refresh the screen they are seeing other days scheduled, notes made and so on. The bizarre results were not "bugs in the system" they were caused by multiple users logged into the same schedule at the same time and both making changes.
There are many more risks associated with allowing all of your providers to have the ability to create and make changes to the on-call schedule.