Two nurses reviewing a shift schedule on paper and a laptop at a hospital counter

What Anyone Who Schedules a Clinical Lab Needs to Know About Intermittent FMLA

Article, Laboratory, Scheduling, Scheduling-Software / Henry Rogland

Continuous FMLA leave is a known quantity. An employee is out for six weeks and the coverage gap is clearly defined. Intermittent FMLA leave is a different kind of problem. The absence is unpredictable, the duration of each episode is uncertain, and the scheduling disruption it creates accumulates across a twelve-month period in ways that

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The Float Pool Is Not a Contingency Plan

Article, Scheduling / Henry Rogland

Every clinical laboratory has some version of a float pool. A float pool is a roster of cross-trained staff, and it becomes an internal resource that gets called on when the schedule falls short. It functions well enough during routine callouts, which is why most labs never examine with greater scrutiny whether it would hold

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On-Call Scheduling Is a Retention Problem

Article, Point-of-care, Scheduling / Henry Rogland

The laboratory on-call model has been inherited more than it has been designed. Most labs run some version of the same arrangement whether it’s a rotating list, a phone that gets passed, or an expectation that whoever is on call will respond when needed. This is often because that is how it has always worked,

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The Dual-Role Staff Problem: Scheduling Employees Who Split Time Between the Lab and Another Department

Article, Competency Software, Laboratory, Pharmacy, Scheduling / Henry Rogland

Staff who fulfill two different roles are more common than you’d think. Dual-role staff arrangements exist because they make operational sense. Unfortunately, they can also create a scheduling compliance problem that sits in the gap between two departments, two sets of managers, and two sets of accountability. The Jurisdiction Problem Under CLIA, the laboratory director

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How Molecular Diagnostics Labs Schedule Around High-Complexity Testing Requirements

Article, Laboratory, Scheduling, Scheduling-Software / Henry Rogland

Molecular diagnostics has grown faster than almost any other area of clinical laboratory medicine over the past decade. What was once a highly specialized discipline confined to reference laboratories and academic medical centers now exists in community hospitals, outpatient clinics, and smaller independent laboratories. That expansion has created a scheduling environment that most workforce management

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Why Histology Scheduling Lives and Dies at the Grossing Station

Article, Laboratory, Scheduling / Henry Rogland

If you were to ask a histology lab manager where their scheduling pressure is most visible, their answer is almost always the same. Grossing, which is the macroscopic examination and sectioning of surgical specimens that happens before anything else in the workflow, is usually the inflection point where staffing decisions have the most direct consequence.

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Why Staggered Start Times May Be Your Organization’s Secret Weapon

5 Steps for Standardizing Organizational Processes Across Multiple Sites

Leave a Comment / Article, CAP Compliance & Inspection Readiness, Scheduling, Scheduling-Software / Henry Rogland

As healthcare systems consolidate and laboratories expand across campuses, regions, and states, multi-site lab networks are becoming the norm rather than the exception. But with that growth comes a familiar problem: process inconsistency. Different locations often use different instruments, workflows, SOPs, documentation formats, or even terminology. And while localized customization might feel practical in the

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Optimizations on the Road | Making the Most of Your Mobile Lab Operations

Leave a Comment / Article, CAP Compliance & Inspection Readiness, Competency Software, Laboratory, Scheduling, Scheduling-Software / Henry Rogland

From 2020 onwards, largely due to Covid-19, we have seen a fundamental shift in strategy in the way we run clinical laboratories and an exponential growth in the use of mobile labs. Already used heavily for public clinics and blood donations, mobile labs have become a crucial part of the medical landscape when it comes

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Learning to Schedule with a Diminished Workforce

Leave a Comment / Article, Scheduling / Henry Rogland

Crafting a Robust Scheduling Solution Amid a Diminishing Workforce At StaffReady we specialize in clinical workforce management and our close collaboration with schedulers in clinical settings gives us unique insights into emerging trends. One trend, particularly impacting pharmacies, is the challenge of scheduling with a shrinking labor pool. This issue has grown so prevalent that

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