EMS PRO
Goodbye HELLO
Paper Schedules... Web-Based Scheduling
Stephanie Fowler Burt, Human Resources Manager Lifestar Ambulance, Salisbury, MD
Like many other private EMS companies, we were experiencing a few critical growing pains. Our company, Lifestar Ambulance, was started in 1987 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had long identified itself as a “mom and pop company.” How- ever, beginning in the early 2000s, we started to witness a slow but undeniable expansion. By 2008, Lifestar was operating twenty-four vehicles in four coun- ties in two states and had more than 100 active personnel on the employee roster.
The change from a small “mom and pop company” to a mid- size corporation left a few important holes in our operations. One of the most obvious and painful issues was the employee scheduling process. As Lifestar continued to grow, the outmoded methods of scheduling were caus-
ing more headaches and setbacks.
We needed a change and we needed it quickly.
For several years, our managers and supervi- sors had been using a massive, over-evolved, and complicatedly hyper-linked Excel spreadsheet to track our employee schedules, cer- tifications and compe- tencies, on-call shifts and much more. It worked, but it was cumbersome and frustrating on many levels.
For example, any chang- es made to the master schedule could be over- written or completely lost if a supervisor forgot to press a save button. Information was not up- to-date. Since employees did not have access to view the master sched- ule, the managers had to continually print hun- dreds of schedules and pass them out. Unfor- tunately and frequently,
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