In August 2009 NEC began the second year of online clinical scheduling for student nurses from the four nursing schools with their nineteen hospital partners via the NEC website.

Instructors, nursing supervisors and hospital CNOs access the schedule with a password.  Schedule changes are initiated through the nursing school program directors to meet changing census and nursing student rotations.

After four years of working with cumbersome paper clinical schedules and a one-year online schedule pilot, NEC launched its online collaborative clinical schedule.  This project streamlines and simplifies nursing student clinical rotation scheduling.

The benefits of this schedule include:

1. It is stored on a secure server with a back up.
2. All director scheduling can be done by an online conference call.
3. Google Docs features a single spreadsheet for each hospital and then tabs for each nursing school and month of that semester.
4. With this approach a Chief Nursing Officer can sign on and go directly to a secure “read only” page. The CNO can send a link or send the file for staff to store.  The files are store and forward…more flexible and accessible. That way, a hospital can have files with all their information at hand – or go online and have access to the server database.
5. Nursing Directors have pass-codes to change the schedule on the fly.
6. It uses technology to reduce workload, repetitious entries and gains cost-effective, accurate and efficient clinical schedule data.

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