Physician satisfaction with a multi-platform digital scheduling system
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Deliberato-2017-Physician satisfaction with a.pdf
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616.8 KB
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Author(s)
Rocha, Leonardo Lima
Lima, Alex Heitor
Santiago, Caroline Reis Maia
Terra, Jose Cláudio Cyrineu
Deliberato, Rodrigo
Dagan, Alon
Celi, Leo Anthony G.
Date Issued
March 2017
Journal
PLoS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Deliberato, Rodrigo Octávio; Rocha, Leonardo Lima; Lima, Alex Heitor; Santiago, Caroline Reis Maia; Terra, Jose Cláudio Cyrineu; Dagan, Alon and Celi, Leo Anthony. “Physician Satisfaction with a Multi-Platform Digital Scheduling System.” Edited by Luís A. Nunes Amaral. PLOS ONE 12, no. 3 (March 2017): e0174127 © 2017 Deliberato et al
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Objective
Physician shift schedules are regularly created manually, using paper or a shared online spreadsheet. Mistakes are not unusual, leading to last minute scrambles to cover a shift. We developed a web-based shift scheduling system and a mobile application tool to facilitate both the monthly scheduling and shift exchanges between physicians. The primary objective was to compare physician satisfaction before and after the mobile application implementation.
Methods
Over a 9-month period, three surveys, using the 4-point Likert type scale were performed to assess the physician satisfaction. The first survey was conducted three months prior mobile application release, a second survey three months after implementation and the last survey six months after.
Results
51 (77%) of the physicians answered the baseline survey. Of those, 32 (63%) were males with a mean age of 37.8 ± 5.5 years. Prior to the mobile application implementation, 36 (70%) of the responders were using more than one method to carry out shift exchanges and only 20 (40%) were using the official department report sheet to document shift exchanges. The second and third survey were answered by 48 (73%) physicians. Forty-eight (98%) of them found the mobile application easy or very easy to install and 47 (96%) did not want to go back to the previous method. Regarding physician satisfaction, at baseline 37% of the physicians were unsatisfied or very unsatisfied with shift scheduling. After the mobile application was implementation, only 4% reported being unsatisfied (OR = 0.11, p < 0.001). The satisfaction level improved from 63% to 96% between the first and the last survey. Satisfaction levels significantly increased between the three time points (OR = 13.33, p < 0.001).
Conclusion
Our web and mobile phone-based scheduling system resulted in better physician satisfaction.
MIT Department
Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
Harvard--MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Laboratory for Computational Physiology
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0174127
