Teamwork Staff Scheduling Delivers Faster Care Coordination and Less Administrative Work at Health Systems Worldwide

With Teamwork, healthcare organizations manage clinician and staff scheduling, exam room use, and other resource planning tasks in the same system they use to care for patients—so schedules and resource usage are visible in real time across the whole organization.

For patients, that can mean faster care experiences. “We used to have a significant lag time between when changes in provider availability were made and when they showed up on the on-call schedule,” James Blum, MD, Chief Health Information Officer at University of Iowa Health Care, said. “With Teamwork, the schedule integrates well with our existing systems, updating in real time so nurses, care coordinators, and other staff can consult with an available physician sooner.”

Teamwork helps clinicians at Dubai Health spend less time on schedule coordination and more time with patients. “Teamwork will make our scheduling more streamlined and more sophisticated,” Sattar Alshryda, PhD., clinical head of trauma and orthopaedic surgery at Dubai Health, said.Dubai Health is the first organization to implement Teamwork for nursing and the first health system outside the US to adopt EpicOps.

Parkview Health reports significant administrative time savings. “It takes us 75% less time to build provider schedules thanks to Teamwork’s templates, real-time coverage views, and direct Epic integration,” Mark Mabus, MD, Parkview’s chief medical information officer, said.

Teamwork is part of Epic’s larger effort to build a fully integrated ERP that’s purpose-built for healthcare—integrating workforce, supply chain, and financial applications with the clinical system. With everything in one place, health systems can work more efficiently and find opportunities to reduce cost. For example, Teamwork shows hospitals how they use exam rooms by day and by provider, revealing unused capacity that can be used to see patients sooner. In the future, EpicOps’ supply chain management capabilities will help health systems predict supply needs based on their upcoming surgery schedules, preventing delays in care and reducing waste.

Aparna Sridhar, Epic’s Vice President of EpicOps, points to a future in which EpicOps will help leaders compare costs and outcomes more easily—seeing not just what a procedure costs, but whether patients who receive it go home sooner or are less likely to be readmitted. “That context will help health systems reduce costs while improving patient care,” she says.