“Just Right” Scheduling (Part 2 of 2)

by Charlene Richardson

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

In Part 1 of this article, we 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 that are 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. One of the nice features of Analytics is that administrators, with access, can specify a time for Analytics dashboards to run based on the previous day’s or week’s activity and have the output sent out via email so that the results are available without even going into the Analytics tool. 

Analytics > Schedules > Active Caregiver Utilization

• To keep caregivers, you definitely should make sure they are getting 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.  This is a great tool to help you determine whether your caregivers are getting the hours they desire.

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, by the scheduler, by the time of day, by day of the week, and even provides a map of where the shifts are located.  This can help identify what is going on with the schedules and can help identify where new caregivers are needed to help focus recruiting efforts.

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 and 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 including requested hours, scheduled hours, cancellations, and percentage utilized.  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.  This helps you know which tasks and level of skill each caregiver is expected to deliver.  This can 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 all administrator tasks that were related to each caregiver, all changes to any schedules which the caregiver was associated with, and 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. Custom reports are flexible, easy to customize, easy to export and show live and current data.

Utilizing these tools and reports can help you keep track of your schedules and 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, a lot of overtime (additional reports are available to show overtime), or a large number of cancellations. These reports can 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 on through ClearCare, which can be especially 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 reach out to us for your FREE consultation. My email is crichardson@seniorcareba.com and we look forward to hearing from you!