“We couldn’t have integrated 7 hospitals where providers have the freedom to move between sites and have their hours tracked and recorded accurately without Durate. It is the only scheduling software that could have made our integration possible.”
The challenge: seven hospitals, and a schedule held together by hand
Brown Emergency Medicine is the academic emergency medicine group of the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. After consolidating into the Brown University Health system, the group grew past 400 physicians, advanced practice providers, and residents staffing seven hospitals from Rhode Island to Massachusetts. Together they care for more than 262,000 emergency patients a year.
For a group like Brown, trying to fill institutional needs and personal requests at the same time would often leave both stacking up, and after the broader consolidation, these requests piled on faster than ever. Every month came down to deciding which rules to bend or break to accommodate competing program needs. This turned administration into constant repair and reaction instead of planning what was best for the program.
Gaps would then get filled with per diems (premium outside coverage) instead of using existing incentive systems. And the systems were scattered, with shifts, targets, payroll adjustments, and changes each in its own spreadsheet or system without cohesion between them.
Brown set out to flip the model: design its ideal system and schedule once, proactively, instead of forever repairing one that didn’t fit every month. The new system would be one source of truth, with standardized incentives and reporting from the individual provider up to program-wide trends that would work together to maximize coverage and meet institutional needs.
The solution: from repairing schedules to designing them
Durate set the system up directly with Brown’s team over a few weeks, ran simulations to find Brown’s optimal settings, and handed it back ready to run, along with the shared standards to operate it. Rather than dropping a tool on the team, Durate gave Brown a working system and a common playbook. From day one, administrators, schedulers, and the physician leaders who own scheduling could see exactly how everything worked and how to adjust it.
Fairness moved from the negotiation to the rules
The old approach forced a “what’s fair” judgment call shift by shift, and rule by rule. The new system sets the structure once and lets the schedule run against it. Brown can now honor essentially every request within the predefined system, change how shifts balance from month to month, and pull reports on how the group and each provider are doing, because fairness is encoded in the rules, not negotiated case by case. Since the change, physician complaints about scheduling have fallen more than 75%.
“We set the staffing rules once and Durate generates the entire schedule from them automatically. We’re building the schedule we actually want up front instead of patching it by hand every block.”
The schedule that runs itself
Durate now handles the bulk of scheduling and coordination, eliminating the cleanup work that used to eat the team’s day. Schedulers and administrators step in only for the issues that genuinely need a human, and roughly 95% of monthly scheduling and operations now run through Durate automatically. Schedule generation itself is down to a single click.
Significantly decreased per diem usage
Balancing the schedule completely gave administrators a clear, accurate picture of staffing, and that changed two things at once. They could finally use their own workforce to the fullest, scheduling internal providers up to the capacity they actually had, without overriding anyone’s PTO, vacation, or requests, instead of leaving that capacity unused, and they had the room to build better, more visible incentives for the shifts that stayed open. Internal coverage now reaches much further, so Brown leans on outside per diem coverage far less. Usage has dropped significantly and keeps falling month over month.
One source of truth
Instead of dozens of disconnected spreadsheets, PDFs, and files, everything from scheduling to payroll is now calculated automatically in one place. What each provider is owed is accurate, traceable, and never reconciled by hand.
Comprehensive suite of analytics
With everything running through one system, Brown’s reporting is now the most comprehensive it’s ever been, spanning provider hours and incentives, site-level staffing, and program-wide performance across all seven hospitals. Reports generate in seconds, and month-over-month and quarter-over-quarter trends that once went unnoticed now surface in time to act on them.
The results
- Schedule generation down to a single click
- ~95% of scheduling and operations now run automatically through Durate
- Per diem coverage down significantly, and still falling
- One source of truth spanning scheduling through payroll
- Almost every request honored, with standardized incentives and time off
- Physician complaints about scheduling down more than 75%
Brown now runs proactively on one standard system. Scheduling, payroll, and tracking are all carried by the same structure and connected. As the group adds sites and providers, those rules scale with it, freeing physicians to deliver exceptional care and administrators from constant last-minute adjustments.