By Elijah Oling Wanga
Benjamin Wingrove, the founder of SchedulePop, recently made an appearance on LTC Heroes, the top-rated podcast about long-term care to share SchedulePop’s eighteen-month journey to developing functionality that helps teams coordinate care more efficiently. “We know long-term care folks are busy,” said Wingrove. “But now, thanks to [SchedulePop], they can solve problems on the go with a few taps and focus on what's really important.” You can listen to the entire interview with Experience Care’s Peter Murphy Lewis below.
Lewis was curious to know how teams use SchedulePop. “We help clients schedule from the inside out, rather than from the outside in,” Wingrove explained. “And that’s because we learned that the number one problem in the industry was finding staff and trying to fill shifts.” And now, with SchedulePop, that sort of scheduling is “as easy as ordering pizza” with information and action at your fingertips through SchedulePop’s mobile apps (an app for managers and an app for staff). Approving a time request or a swap in SchedulePop can be done with a simple tap. And staff members can easily view and manage their scheduled shifts, pick up available shifts, or request shift swaps.
This innovative technology not only helps put the focus back on care but also helps with staff retention. “Every single shift that you can fill internally without going outside [to employ agency staff] can help with retention,” Wingrove told Lewis. “It makes the team stronger, as you're helping an employee get extra work that they wanted and potentially helping somebody that needs to get out of a shift do so without having to call out. And that can prevent an awkward situation that could lead to employee turnover, saving quite a bit of money.”
Another way SchedulePop saves organizations money is helping to manage and track budgets, including closely managing agency costs. “Scheduling and staff management in senior care and long-term care is a very large part of the operating budget,” Wingrove said. “So we give teams actionable data that pops up (which is how SchedulePop’s name came to be) to help them make good business decisions and, hopefully, save money and provide better care.”
Lewis was also interested in learning how SchedulePop serves to improve the processes of an entire organization. “SchedulePop allows users to select the buildings they want from their group and view the relevant data,” Wingrove said. He added that users can also filter by date and time to view spending in a particular quarter. “For instance, you could see what an agency is spending in the current quarter based on what they have scheduled,” he explained.
SchedulePop’s venture into long-term care began a year before the COVID pandemic. Shortly thereafter, the team began adding functionality and integration with Experience Care, Wingrove explained. “Experience Care’s software pulls the census data over, giving us access to PPD,” he noted. “We also have a star rating tool that applies to skilled nursing facilities, and this makes it super easy to schedule against those targets and see what they're over or under as well as where they need to be.”
By partnering with long-term care EHR vendors, SchedulePop pulls over information that helps buildings manage staff schedules more efficiently. “We’re really excited about the functionality we’re developing to further help buildings not only fill shifts but also schedule the needs of patients and residents,” Wingrove said. Indeed, SchedulePop’s future developments are certain to facilitate greater communication, efficiencies, cost savings and, ultimately, improve care in long-term care facilities across America.
