Healthcare Scheduling Software

Providing exceptional patient care begins with an expertly managed workforce.

In the dynamic healthcare sector, efficient staff scheduling is more than an administrative task; it is the foundation for quality care, operational efficiency, and employee satisfaction.

Our Healthcare Staff Scheduling Software is designed to meet the unique and complex demands of hospitals, care homes, and community care providers worldwide.

Reduce Costs and Streamline Processes with Softworks

Our mission is to empower healthcare organisations to streamline HR processes, increase productivity, and significantly reduce costs through improved management, scheduling, and utilisation of their most valuable asset: their employees.

We understand that managing a workforce management project might seem like a daunting task, but with the right planning, team, and system, it can be a smooth and rewarding endeavour, delivering substantial benefits across HR, management, and for employees themselves.

Softworks specialises in automating the work rules and pay policies already in place within your organisation, eliminating time-consuming manual tasks related to employee Time and Attendance, Absence, Flexitime, Skills & Training management, and more.

Softworks’ Cutting Edge Automations

We have developed a tightly integrated hub of automation—precisely what the healthcare industry needs to navigate its challenges and achieve a future of sustained excellence.

Softworks Workforce Management (WFM) solutions automate the myriad of tasks that often bog down HR and managerial teams – from time and attendance tracking to absence management, flexitime, and skills tracking.

By moving these critical activities from manual spreadsheets and emails to one central, intelligent system, Softworks saves invaluable time, improves data accuracy, and significantly boosts employee engagement.

Scalable Healthcare Scheduling Software for All Providers

Our WFM solutions are robust, intuitive, and highly configurable.

We have designed our user-friendly healthcare scheduling platform to transform the unique challenges of the sector into streamlined, efficient, and people-focused operations.

We believe that a well-managed workforce is the bedrock of exceptional patient care. This comprehensive approach is essential for achieving optimal operational efficiency and a truly engaged workforce.

What is Healthcare Workforce Management Software?

Healthcare workforce management software is a specialised digital platform designed to help hospitals, nursing homes, and community care providers optimize the deployment of their most vital resource—their people.

At Softworks, we understand that in the healthcare sector, effective staffing is not merely an administrative task; it is critical for ensuring patient safety, quality of care, and cost control.

Our software goes beyond basic time tracking to provide a comprehensive solution for eRostering, Time & Attendance, Patient Acuity, and Absence Management.

How Softworks Could Optimise Your Healthcare Business

Unlike generic systems, Softworks is engineered to handle the unique complexities of a 24/7 healthcare environment, such as managing multi-disciplinary teams, complex shift patterns, and union agreements.

A key differentiator of our solution is Acuity-Based Staffing, allowing you to align nursing resources with actual patient dependency and care needs.

This ensures you always have the right staff, with the right skills and certifications, in the right place at the right time and helps organisations like yours significantly reduce reliance on expensive agency staff and minimise unnecessary overtime.

Ensuring Compliance and Workplace Safety

Compliance and safety are non-negotiable in healthcare. We automate adherence to complex legislation—such as the European Working Time Directive or PBJ reporting in the US—and track employee skills and training expirations to ensure your facility remains audit-ready.

Furthermore, our Employee Self-Service App empowers your staff to view rosters, swap shifts, and request leave from their mobile devices, helping to boost engagement and retention in a sector facing high burnout rates.

Reduce administrative burden and focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional patient care.

Healthcare Scheduling Software: The Right Care, At the Right Time

Ensuring the right number of skilled staff are in the right place at the right time is paramount in the challenging landscape of healthcare.

Hospitals, nursing homes, and specialist units face a complex Rostering challenge, managing levels, grades, and skillsets to staff a multitude of tasks and duties.

Without effective staff scheduling, healthcare establishments cannot provide the expected level of care.

The Scheduling Challenge for Healthcare Providers

The healthcare industry operates 24/7, with unknown and often unpredictable demand drivers.

This constant demand, coupled with fluctuating patient volumes, emergency situations, and unexpected surges, requires flexibility and adaptability in the rostering/scheduling process. The complexities are immense, encompassing variable start and finish times, rotating patterns, overtime, diverse departments, teams, and specialties.

Additionally, managing absenteeism, time-off requests, and shift swapping introduces further intricate challenges, demanding careful coordination and approval procedures.

The Consequences of Ineffective Scheduling

Overstaffing can have dire financial consequences for healthcare businesses, while understaffing can result in critical errors that compromise patient safety or increase the risk of medical errors.

Ineffective scheduling often leads to overworked and unsatisfied workers, contributing to stress, burnout, and higher rates of absenteeism among staff.

A poll by ConnectRN revealed that:

• 50% of nurses have considered leaving the profession.
• 32% of nurses feel unsupported by their employers.
• Businesses lose an estimated 4.5% of total payroll costs due to unplanned absences.

These challenges are exacerbated by persistent staff shortages, an aging population with increasing demand for geriatric and chronic disease care, and the complexities of implementing new technologies while maintaining existing services.

Outdated Scheduling Leads to Inefficiences

The traditional methods of scheduling with spreadsheets, clipboards, and notice boards are no longer sufficient.

These manual processes are time-consuming, prone to errors, and lack the real-time visibility needed for informed decision-making.

This is where Softworks Workforce Management Solutions for Healthcare truly shines.

How to Maximise Operational Efficiency in Healthcare

We provide the tools and processes needed to balance the high cost of workforce, tight budgets, variable staffing needs, complex workforce laws, and union agreements, all without compromising patient care, service, compliance, or employee satisfaction.

Our integrated solutions are designed to address the unique challenges of healthcare organisations, offering a path to improved operational efficiency and a better working environment for nurses and other healthcare professionals.

By digitalising your workforce’s management, healthcare organisations can streamline services, reduce costs, and deliver superior quality care to patients, transforming their operations through advanced technologies, data analytics, and automation.

Healthcare Staff Scheduling Software Solutions

Softworks Workforce Management Solutions are designed to tackle the specific challenges faced by healthcare providers, helping them deliver high-quality, cost-effective care while prioritising their most important resource: their people.

The platform automates the entire workforce management cycle, from staff induction and Rostering through to payroll authorisation.

Our solutions simplify and automate employee management tasks in critical areas such as:

• Time and Attendance
• Employee Scheduling
• Absence Management
• HR Management
• Skills and Training Management
• Regulatory Compliance
• Employee Self-Service.

We offer a robust and reliable system that is easy to use and intuitive—a key consideration given that healthcare employees often have no prior experience with Workforce Management Software.

Transforming your Healthcare Workforce with Softworks

Here’s how Softworks provides a complete picture of your employees, capturing comprehensive real-time information, offering insightful dashboards, and providing historical data reporting, allowing you to construct a full and accurate overview of your entire organisation.

1. Optimised Employee Rostering and Scheduling

Softworks’ eRostering and Employee Scheduling solutions automatically create schedules at the touch of a button that align:

• Labour with demand
• Required skill mix
• Employee preferences

The system intelligently generates optimal schedules—crucial for complex rosters across various departments, teams, and multiple locations, accommodating variable start and finish times, rotating patterns, and overtime.

Our “Vacancy Alerter” feature sends triggers via email and text to available and qualified staff to fill last-minute gaps, participate in shift and vacation bids, or manage shift trades, ensuring operations remain seamless.

How Healthcare Businesses Benefit from eRostering

Villa Basilea reduced monthly scheduling from several days to just two hours using our solution.

Bon Secours Hospital manages over 600 rostering schedules and 286 different shift patterns with Softworks, significantly improving efficiency.

2. Comprehensive Time and Attendance Tracking

Automated Time and Attendance tracking minimises errors and ensures accurate payroll processing and comes as standard with our powerful, user-friendly tool for both leadership and employees.

Automating Time and Attendance eliminates manual recording, reduces errors, and decreases the time spent creating payroll files. We offer multiple clocking methods, including biometric and PIN terminals, and mobile apps for personal devices, which help minimise payroll errors by automating time tracking.

Honor-based timesheets are also available for salaried staff or non-clocking cultures. This seamless integration with your existing payroll systems ensures accurate and timely payments for your healthcare teams, freeing up HR and payroll staff for more strategic initiatives.

How Healthcare Businesses Benefit from Time and Attendance Tracking

One Softworks client eliminated payroll queries by 90% after implementing our system, and another halved the time spent on weekly payroll in one area.

3. Real-Time Monitoring and Data-Driven Decision Making

Our Workforce Management Software delivers a clear picture of workforce activity through detailed dashboards, KPIs, and reports on attendance, absenteeism, overtime, vacation balances, scheduling, and sick leave.

Managers receive real-time, event-driven workforce data, enabling them to make instant, informed decisions based on facts and respond to changing demands. This analytical insight empowers healthcare organisations to optimise their workforce and make changes in response to internal and external dynamics in real-time.

This empowers hospital managers to react immediately to changing patient demands or unexpected staff shortages, optimising workforce costs and performance across all units.

4. Proactive Absence Management

Softworks’ Absence Management solutions provide a central system for all employee Time and Attendance data, enabling you to track absences by type, frequency, and pattern.

Our automated workflows notify managers of unexplained absences or trigger return-to-work interviews. This proactive approach minimises disruptions, especially crucial when dealing with unexpected staff shortages in hospitals.

Softworks’ AI-powered Absence Predictor further enhances this by analysing historical data to forecast likely no-shows, allowing for proactive schedule adjustments and minimising disruptions. This ensures a safe working environment and consistently available staff.

5. Comprehensive Skills and Training Management

Our Learning & Skills Tracking module helps you track employees’ skills, training, and qualifications, managing current and future learning requirements.

This ensures that healthcare providers can confidently assign personnel with the precise expertise needed for each task, enhancing both patient safety and care quality.

Automated alerts for soon-to-expire certifications prompt you to organise retraining proactively, protecting your business from regulatory and safety risks. This enables precise Skill-Based Matching when creating staff rosters.

6. Empowering Employees with Self-Service and Mobile Access

Our Employee Self-Service (ESS) App, accessible on smartphones, tablets, or desktops, empowers employees to:

• Clock in/out (with GPS location tracking for community care)
• View their schedules
• Request leave
• Swap shifts,
• Update personal information.

This promotes autonomy, engagement, and job satisfaction, a critical factor in retaining skilled healthcare workers. Employees input schedule preferences and limitations, request shift swaps, and easily view annual leave balances.

This flexibility is proven to improve work-life balance, significantly reduce stress and burnout, and ultimately enhance retention rates among your valued staff.

Key Features of Our Healthcare Scheduling Software

Softworks’ Healthcare Scheduling Software is not just about automation; it’s about intelligent, adaptive, and comprehensive management that directly enhances patient care and supports your staff.

Our solutions are designed to address the specific nuances of healthcare, ensuring that every operational aspect contributes to a more efficient and compassionate environment.

1. Patient Acuity-Based Staffing and Safe Staffing Levels

A cornerstone of our healthcare solution is Patient Acuity-based staffing. This sophisticated feature identifies the amount of nursing care needed for each patient based on their level of dependency, intensity, complexity, and required tasks.

Instead of traditional staffing based on patient numbers, our system allocates resources according to actual patient needs. This ensures that high-dependency patients receive adequate resources.

This approach optimises nursing schedules, reduces costs, and increases employee satisfaction because nurses are not overloaded or overstretched, minimising stress and burnout.

Bolstering Safe Staffing Levels

Crucially, our system supports the achievement and monitoring of Safe Staffing Levels.

Managers can proactively predict staffing requirements for subsequent shifts, calling in staff ahead of time and freeing up valuable time from paperwork to focus on patient care.

2. Ensuring Regulatory Compliance and Patient Safety

The healthcare industry is heavily regulated, with stringent requirements around working hours, rest periods, patient safety, and data protection (e.g., European Working Time Directive, Fair Labor Standards Act, GDPR).

Softworks’ Workforce Management Software takes the hard work out of compliance by automatically tracking adherence to these workforce laws, including overtime, minimum wage, and mandatory breaks.

This proactive compliance management minimises the risk of costly fines, legal issues, and a damaged reputation.

Integrating Fairness Rules

Our software incorporates customisable Fairness Rules to ensure equitable shift distribution across your workforce.

These rules can be configured for aspects like weekends, public holidays, night shifts, and on-call assignments, preventing preferential treatment and ensuring all team members are treated equally.

This transparent and fairn approach reduces resentment and promotes a positive work environment—vital for morale and retention in demanding healthcare roles.

3. Integrated EHR and Patient Appointment Management

The scheduling system is designed to facilitate seamless integration with core clinical systems.

EHR (Electronic Health Record) Integration allows staffing decisions to be directly informed by real-time patient data and acuity scores, ensuring the roster is always responsive to clinical needs.

Furthermore, the system can support Patient Appointment Booking functionality, ensuring that specialised staff are scheduled and available at the times when patient appointments are booked. This coordination is vital for efficiency in outpatient clinics and community care settings.

4. Demand Forecasting and Workforce Optimisation

Our software’s cutting-edge Demand Forecasting functionality helps ensure you’re less likely to be caught out by unexpected staffing shortages.

By analysing historical data and predicting future demand, it enables your hospital to avoid costly overstaffing or dangerous understaffing situations. Our software ensures that you align your workforce to precisely meet patient demand—on budget.

A significant outcome is the reduction of costly overtime and the minimised reliance on temporary agency staff, which directly impacts your hospital’s financial health.

5. AI-Driven Insights for Predictive Management

Softworks is at the forefront of integrating AI into workforce management to enhance decision-making.

Our AI-powered Absence Predictor analyses historical shift patterns and absence trends to forecast likely no-shows, enabling proactive adjustments to schedules. This helps minimise disruptions, while ensuring workforce stability in fast-paced healthcare environments.

AI also facilitates the upskilling of existing employees by automating time-consuming administrative tasks, allowing staff to dedicate more time to skill development and strategic projects.

By ensuring high-quality data, Softworks enables organisations to generate accurate reports and insights, helping HR teams make better decisions in areas like employee engagement and workforce forecasting.

6. Compliance Reporting and Audit Trails

Softworks provides robust Compliance Reporting & Audit Trails, offering full audit capabilities and generating comprehensive compliance reports at the click of a button.

For long-term care facilities, our system supports Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) reporting, ensuring accurate and transparent staffing data submission to meet regulatory requirements.

Our commitment to data integrity extends to ensuring compliance with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and maintaining high security standards to protect sensitive employee information.

Time & Attendance and Employee Empowerment

Our powerful Time & AttendanceIntegration for Payroll Accuracy automates time tracking, eliminating manual recording, reducing errors, and saving substantial administrative time. This integrates seamlessly with your existing payroll systems to ensure accurate, timely payments for your healthcare teams.

Our comprehensive HR Core application serves as a standalone system or integrates seamlessly with your existing HR infrastructure. It streamlines HR processes, reduces time-consuming data entry, and provides fast and efficient access to personnel details, employment history, time and attendance, absence, and skills information.

For healthcare, centralising employee data is crucial for managing certifications, compliance, and quick access to contact details for a dispersed workforce. It even auto-generates emails to eliminate paperwork and improve response times for employee queries.

Hit Peak Efficiency with Healthcare Scheduling Software

Softworks’ Hospital Employee Scheduling/rostering Software ensures that your hospital operates at peak efficiency, fully compliant with regulations, and continuously striving for the highest standards of patient care and staff well-being.

Softworks has over three decades of experience, embedded in organisations all over the world, assisting companies to organise the working day in a way that makes them more productive and profitable.

Trust Softworks with your Workforce Challenges

Our solutions are trusted by a large number of hospitals and healthcare providers globally, tackling challenging problems like complex rostering/scheduling, regulatory compliance, and employee engagement.

Ready to revolutionise your healthcare staffing and unlock a new era of efficiency and care quality?

Book a Demo today and let our experts demonstrate how your healthcare business could thrive!