Welcome to HosPortal! This article is the first in a series is the first in a series to assist our customers set up HosPortal quickly and effectively. It is intended for senior roster administrators and senior doctors who are about to embark on their rostering journey with us and are involved in the setup process.

HosPortal is Australia’s leading medical rostering platform, used by over 90 health facilities. We have had a lot of experience with different types of customers: each clinical craft group has different expectations, and each department often has its own preferred way of doing things. We try really hard to make HosPortal flexible enough to deal with each site’s preferences and we have many features and tools to make your staff administration easy and efficient.

But none of our customers use all of our features. And different customers use our features in different ways. So an important part of our early discussions is to work out what features you should use and how to use them. Even features that you might get benefit from are not helpful of they are prohibitive to maintain and keep the data updated.

We give our customers complete control over our functions and settings. There is almost nothing a HosPortal staff member can do that our customers cannot do themselves through the Admin panel. But we know that there are some decisions that are harder to unwind if you change your mind later on, so we will spend time with you early on to get these features right.

Generally the process will be:

We prefer that customers do not jump too far ahead in the sequence: we want to be able to hold your hand and guide you, especially around decisions that might have material consequences for your work and users' satisfaction later on.

HosPortal supports you as well as we can to get you onboard with our rostering system. This is a collaborative process in which we will train you on the relevant parts you need to know when you need to know them, rather than try to teach you everything to begin with or train you on aspects that you will forget by the time you need them.

There are some things that are just easier and quicker for us to do for you. But for most features it is important that you and your users understand how to build and maintain the features they are using. So we might enter some examples to get your feedback, but you should expect to be entering the majority of your rosters and data directly and you should be comfortable amending settings.

We will work with you in the early meetings to try to estimate what is a realistic time to go live.

We have onboarded customers in a few days. But where the setup is complex you should expect a few weeks to determine the correct design, and then 8-10 weeks of weekly meetings to implement it.

When thinking about timing, we want to work backwards from your preferred go-live date. This is the date when your users first get access to HosPortal and is typically before the first shift.

Below we describe 5 items we think help make the onboarding process efficient and as quick as possible.

Make sure you have allocated the right people and decision-makers to the team. Despite our extensive experience, HosPortal cannot make decisions that rely on understanding your hospital process, culture and expectations.

Set up some regular catch-up points with HosPortal. We try to arrange weekly meetings of 1 hour each.

Feel free to play with HosPortal as much as you like, but please ask us if you think something is not right: we can save work and possible re-work if we understand your issues early.

To build your confidence you will always have access to our Mirror site, which is an exact copy of your setup that we duplicate every night that you can edit and play with that does not affect your live setup. You will have access to Mirror for as long as you are using HosPortal and not just during the setup process. We will send instructions for that site separately.

HosPortal is extremely powerful and flexible and has a track record of improving efficiency at over 90 sites. But we have had customers who have not had to amend their workflow or rostering practices somewhat once they leave their old systems behind.

We know that we try to show potential customers what we can do prior to executing a contract. And we assume that customers have asked the relevant questions before deciding that HosPortal is the correct rostering tool for their facility. But we know that sometimes HosPortal works differently to what you are used to, or may not be able to do some things that you are used to. So please anticipate that there may be some flexibility required.

Where we do not work as you would expect or like, we will be asking you:

We similarly try to be flexible, in that we can sometimes amend our software to meet a customer's needs. But we also need to prioritise these requests against other customers and our development plans, and may need new customers to accept our existing alternative approach for some period even after launch.

We also know that we sometimes have some very keen users who want to jump ahead and start using more of HosPortal’s features. Please let us know if you want to do this. Although we love our users to be very proactive, there are some important decisions and choices in the early days that can have big impacts on your satisfaction with future rosters. So please talk to us in our regular catch-ups so we can guide you appropriately.

We will share with you a data request that asks for copies of your rosters and descriptions of all the people involved in the setup process.

After that we will arrange a Discovery meeting to make sure we understand what is there and set up our regular meetings.

Preparing for the Discovery meeting

Getting help during onboarding