Planning - an overview

RehabAlpha has a collection of tools and functionality to help you plan for the future. This guide walks through the planning workflow from therapist and patient setup through schedule optimization and notices.

Use dummy data

RehabAlpha is still under active development. Use a test organization and dummy patients, therapists, facilities, and clinical details while exploring these tools.

Where details live

This guide is an end-to-end tour. For focused details, use these guides:

• Manage availability for availability rules, card order, and overrides.
• Use the schedule for person and facility schedule views.
• Manage notices for notice handling.
• How the autoscheduler works for advanced optimizer behavior.

Create a test organization

Start from a test organization. A test organization gives you fake therapists, facilities, and patients so you can explore planning without entering real patient information.

1. Open your account page.
2. Click Create a test organization.
3. Open the new organization's dashboard.

Set up therapist planning details

Pick one therapist in the test organization and review their planning settings.

1. Open People.
2. Click Therapists.
3. Select a therapist.
4. Click Settings.

Add a simple availability row and any schedule preferences you want to test. For availability card behavior, see Manage availability.

Set up patient planning details

Create a new patient, then review the patient's planning settings.

1. Open People.
2. Click Patients.
3. Click New patient.
4. Enter dummy patient details.
5. Click Save.
6. Open the new patient's Settings.

Add a simple availability row and any schedule preferences you want to test. For availability card behavior, see Manage availability.

Create the clinical work that drives planning

Planning becomes more useful once RehabAlpha has an admission, a therapy case, and a treatment plan to schedule against.

1. Open the patient.
2. Create a new admission.
3. Assign the admission to a facility.
4. Set the Place of Service to 31 - Skilled Nursing Facility.
5. Save the admission.
6. Open the admission.
7. Create a new therapy case.
8. Set Discipline to Physical Therapy.
9. Save the case.
10. Open the case and create an Evaluation.
11. Add a treatment plan to the evaluation.
12. Save the evaluation.

Related guides:

• Set up a patient
• Start a therapy case
• Write an evaluation

Review generated future work

When you save an evaluation with a treatment plan, RehabAlpha uses that plan to create future-dated planning work. Depending on the treatment plan, that future work can include treatments, progress reports, and a recertification.

Each planned document has an estimated duration. RehabAlpha uses those durations when it calculates planned workload, daily utilization, and whether therapists have enough planned hours to cover the work.

Open one of the future treatments.

1. Open the patient's therapy case.
2. Find a future treatment.
3. Click the treatment.

A future treatment has a date. It may not have a time yet. You can set a time manually when you know where the treatment belongs in the day.

The treatment also has autoscheduler settings. These settings control whether the autoscheduler may overwrite the treatment's therapist, date, or estimated duration. If a setting is locked, RehabAlpha treats that value as intentional and leaves it alone during optimization. If it is unlocked, the autoscheduler may change it when searching for a better schedule.

Compare schedule views

Every person and facility has a schedule view. Use these schedules to inspect the same planning data from different perspectives.

1. Open the patient and click Schedule.
2. Open the therapist and click Schedule.
3. Open the facility and click Schedule.

For schedule view details, see Use the schedule.

Open the facility planner

The facility planner brings planned hours, future documentation, treatments, assignments, and schedule notices into one place.

1. Open Facilities.
2. Select the facility attached to the patient's admission.
3. Click Planner.
4. Choose the date range you want to review.

The planner includes these sections:

• Date range sets the planner window.
• Planned hours shows therapist hours by date and facility.
• Optimize schedule runs the autoscheduler for the selected facility and date range.
• Summary stats shows planned hours, document and treatment hours, utilization, treatment counts, and unassigned treatment counts by date and discipline.
• Therapist stats breaks planned hours, assigned documentation and treatment hours, utilization, and treatment counts down by therapist and day.
• Stacked assignments shows each day as therapist stacks so you can compare workload and move assignments.
• Daily assignments by person shows treatment cards for one selected patient or therapist.
• Notices shows schedule-related issues for the facility.

Improve planned hours

Start with Summary stats. Scroll to the end of the table and review the Total columns.

Look at Utilization for each discipline. The goal is to bring utilization close to 100%.

Start with OT:

1. Find the OT utilization in the Total group.
2. If OT utilization is over 100%, OT is understaffed for the planner range. Go back to Planned hours and add planned OT hours where appropriate.
3. If OT utilization is below 100%, reduce planned OT hours where appropriate.
4. Save the planned-hours changes.

Then repeat the same review for PT and SLP.

In the Planned hours table, hover over a cell to see how many hours the therapist is available for that day. If you enter more planned hours than are available, the cell turns red. RehabAlpha allows the entry because real scheduling sometimes requires an intentional exception, but the red state makes the exception visible.

Review therapist stats

The therapist stats table gives you a therapist-by-day view of the same workload. Use it to see whether one therapist is carrying more planned work than another therapist in the same discipline.

Each therapist row shows planned hours, documentation and treatment hours, utilization, and treatment count across the planner dates and total period.

Explore stacked assignments

The Stacked assignments section is a visual way to compare therapist workload by day.

1. Pick a day tab.
2. Find a treatment that can reasonably move to another therapist in the same discipline.
3. Drag the treatment card from one therapist stack onto another therapist stack.
4. Review the stacks for a few different days.
5. Build a mental picture of which therapists look overloaded, underused, or unassigned.

Now scroll back up and click Optimize schedule. Wait for the optimizer to finish, then read the output. It shows whether a better schedule was found, how many treatments were optimized, and how the schedule score changed.

After optimization finishes, scroll back to Stacked assignments and review the same days again. Usually, the optimizer spreads treatments out so therapists in the same discipline have roughly similar utilization.

Sometimes the optimizer terminates early because it hits its processing limit. When that happens, RehabAlpha displays a message like:

Optimizer terminated after hitting the processing limit of 10,000 schedule competitions.

If you see that message, you can run Optimize schedule again. A second run often improves the schedule further because it starts from the newly optimized schedule.

For a deeper explanation, see How the autoscheduler works.

Explore daily assignments

In Daily assignments by person, use the person selector to choose a few patients at random.

For each patient:

1. Review the treatment cards across the date grid.
2. Drag a treatment card to another date where it makes sense.
3. Review the horizontal treatment-plan compliance bars above the daily grid.
4. Hover over a compliance bar to see the treatment plan details.

Then choose one or two therapists from the same selector. Therapist views show the daily work assigned to that therapist, while patient views show the daily work planned for that patient.

Review notices

The Notices section at the bottom of the planner shows schedule-related issues for the facility. Use it to find problems that should be resolved before the schedule is treated as ready.

Examples include:

• unassigned treatments
• noncompliant treatment windows
• patient preference violations
• therapist preference violations
• license or documentation-related notices when applicable

Patient and therapist preferences can become notices when the preference's Notice control is set to generate a notice. For example, if a patient averts a certain therapist and the schedule assigns that therapist anyway, RehabAlpha can surface a patient preference violation notice.

For filtering, fixing, refreshing, and snoozing notices, see Manage notices.