iRX WorkSphere in production

When a ward is short of a nurse, a form starts travelling. The ward manager fills it in a spreadsheet, sends it by e-mail, it stops somewhere, and three weeks later nobody can say where. Meanwhile it is unclear whether the post is in the establishment plan at all and how many full-time equivalents remain on it.

The application brings the two together. The plan holds positions with their planned full-time equivalents; a request attaches itself to a position, and while it is being filled in you can already see what remains once filled, approved and pending requests are subtracted. A request with no link to the plan is carried as an additional post — that is a statement, not a mistake.

The three request types follow hospital practice: hiring, agency staff and recruitment agencies. Each has its own fields — for agency staff the licence under the German temporary work act, the maximum hire period and equal pay; for recruitment the fee and what was tried before.

Each house defines its own approval path, separately per request type: which steps exist, from which role, when a reason is compulsory, and whether a step may be taken on one's own request. If the path does not add up, the application says so. Whoever raised a request does not decide on it.

Once approved, the actual appointment is reported back, and the plan adds the full-time equivalents itself; its figures no longer depend on somebody maintaining them. The plan itself can be taken over from the spreadsheet the house already keeps — columns are recognised from the header row, and a preview comes before anything is written.

Papers belong with the request: the job description, the agency offer, a committee decision. They are attached to it and stored outside the web directory. For the personnel file the request can be printed together with the path it took.

The steps are announced by e-mail, and once a day a reminder goes out about anything waiting longer than two weeks. Anyone who does not want the mail can switch it off.

Controlling has its own view: what has been approved this year and what is still open, by hospital and service group, month by month, with posts outside the plan shown separately. The list of requests exports to a spreadsheet.

One installation carries a group of hospitals. No house sees another's data, users switch between them at the top, and an approver can be limited to their own hospitals. Two-factor authentication is available and a house may require it of everyone.