Physician scheduling
should not run on spreadsheets.
Across six hospitals, a scheduling coordination team was spending more than fourteen hours every week resolving conflicts that a better system would have prevented automatically. The tool was not the problem. The absence of one was.
The first thing we asked when we started this project was not “what do you want us to design.” We asked to watch the scheduling team work for two days.
What we saw was a team of highly skilled coordinators doing the right things with the wrong tools. They had color-coded the spreadsheets. They had created their own naming conventions. They had built informal systems on top of the formal ones because the formal ones were not sufficient. When someone went on leave, they sent a WhatsApp message to three people.
This told us something important. The problem was not behavior. The people were working exactly as hard as they should. The problem was that nothing about their environment was designed for what they were doing. Our job was to give the environment a shape that matched the work.
The problem was not behavior. The problem was that nothing about their environment was designed for what they were doing.
The calendar and the availability roster were separate documents.
Physicians recorded their availability in one document. The weekly schedule was built in another. These two were never automatically compared. Every conflict began here.
Conflict detection happened after the schedule was finished.
Coordinators would complete a full schedule draft, then manually scan it for problems. The system created no friction at the moment a conflict was being made.
Approvals happened over email and phone with no audit trail.
Schedule changes requiring department head approval were managed by email chain. Who approved what and when existed only in inboxes.
The system flags problems before they become problems.
We built conflict detection that runs with every scheduling action. If a physician is assigned to two overlapping shifts, or if leave conflicts with a rotation, the system flags it immediately, before the schedule is saved.
One source of truth. For all six hospitals.
Physician availability now updates the scheduling view automatically. The coordinator no longer maintains a separate roster. The calendar and the availability data are always in sync.
Every change has a complete audit trail.
Email-based approvals replaced with a structured in-platform workflow. Department heads receive notifications, review in context, approve or reject with a comment. Every decision is logged with a timestamp.
Six hospitals. One administrator. One dashboard.
Before this project there was no way to see across all six hospitals at once. The new multi-hospital view shows the scheduling health of the entire organisation in one screen.
What the data showed after thirty days.
“We had people who had been doing scheduling for years tell us this was the first tool that actually made sense for how they work. We did not expect that.”
01Discovery and researchWeek 1+
02UX architectureWeek 2+
03Visual designWeek 3+
04Frontend engineeringWeek 4+
05Backend engineeringWeeks 5–6+
06QA and deploymentWeeks 7–8+
Ready to build something like this?
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