How to Schedule “Just Right” (Part 2/2)

How Goldilocks would use WellSky® Personal Care (formerly known as ClearCare Online) to effectively manage and analyze schedules.

Part 1 of this article covered a few tools and tips to help you effectively schedule in WellSky® Personal Care (Formerly ClearCare).  Continuing with our theme of “Just Right” Scheduling (the way Goldilocks would do it). Let’s review reports and dashboards that can be used to provide insights into how close your agency is coming to scheduling “Just Right”.

First, we’ll examine some offerings in the Analytics dashboard. It’s a great idea to become familiar with using the pre-built dashboards in Analytics. These are all available to you from WellSky® Personal Care (at no extra cost). These pre-built dashboards can help you analyze how well your schedules are working. There are many handy features of Analytics. They can specify a time for Analytics dashboards to run based on the previous day’s or week’s activity. Afterward, they can have the output sent out via email. This way the results are available without even going into the Analytics tool. 

Analytics > Schedules > Active Caregiver Utilization

• To keep caregivers, you should ensure they get the hours they want. This dashboard gives you insight into hours wanted by the caregivers, regular hours worked, overtime hours worked, and a percentage of how many hours the caregivers wanted vs. the total hours worked. Therefore this is a great tool to help you determine whether your caregivers are getting the desired hours.

Analytics > Schedules > Open Shifts

• A secondary dashboard in Analytics that can help is the “Open Shifts” dashboard. This dashboard does a beautiful job of breaking down open shifts by the client, the scheduler, the time of day, and the day of the week. It even provides a map of where the shifts are located. This can help identify what is going on with the schedules and determine where new caregivers are needed.
• Overall there are many other dashboards available in Analytics. These are only two of the dashboards that will provide critical insight into your scheduling success.  Remember, though, that the Analytics data in WellSky® Personal Care is not live. It only shows data as of the previous day.

For live data, you can use Reports and Custom Reports:

Reports > Caregiver Hours Report

• This report shows an analysis of the hours for the week by the caregiver. Therefore this includes requested hours, scheduled hours, cancellations, and percentage utilized. Meaning, This is a great way to identify whether you have caregivers who are active in the system but are being underutilized.

Reports > Schedules (Future)

• This valuable report can be grouped by the caregiver to show not only the schedules and hours but also the ADLs and iADLs that are part of each assigned client’s care plan and schedule. Now you know which tasks and level of skill each caregiver is expected to deliver. This can further help you ensure that highly skilled caregivers are not being asked to do companion or household care and vice versa.

Reports > Activity by Caregiver

• Activity by Caregiver is another valuable report to help analyze scheduling efforts. This report shows many important caregiver activities. Including administrator tasks related to each caregiver, and all changes to any schedules which the caregiver was associated with. Finally, any emails or texts sent to the caregiver through the system including Missed Clock In/Out notifications.

Custom Reports

• Custom Reports also has several reports that you can run under the schedules section, including Caregiver Unavailability and Upcoming Shifts by Caregiver. These reports are flexible, easy to customize, easy to export, and show live and current data.

Just Right Scheduling

Utilizing these tools and reports can help you keep track of your schedules and furthermore, identify areas where there may be room for improvement. For example, clients who are difficult to staff will likely show a large number of open shifts and a lot of overtime or a large number of cancellations. (If you are looking for reports about overtime, there are others available). These reports can also help provide insight into why the client has a large number of caregivers who have worked with them.

One final note about scheduling. Remember that every change to a shift is tracked and can be reported through ClearCare. This can also be helpful when you need to know who, other than your Scheduler, has made changes to scheduled shifts. This can reduce scheduler frustration which can occur when others try to “help” with the schedule without properly communicating changes to the primary scheduler for the client.

If you missed it, please check out Part 1 of “Just Right” Scheduling for information on tools within WellSky® Personal Care to help schedule effectively.

If you would like more information about the topics in this blog, please contact us for your FREE consultation. My email is crichardson@seniorcareba.com and we look forward to hearing from you!