The AI Operating System Helping Relias Build More Profitable, Provider-Friendly Schedules
Centralize scheduling across 32 sites, reduce clinician scheduling time, minimize locums usage, and build better schedules by optimizing across provider preferences, fairness, cost, and coverage.
Describe
Relias Has Outgrown Manual Scheduling
Relias is coordinating schedules across 32 sites with 20–25 providers involved. Providers handwrite schedules, which are then uploaded into WhenToWork. As preferences, sites, and cross-coverage changes every month, this becomes very expensive and unscalable.
Provider-First Culture
Relias prioritizes provider happiness, retention, preferences, and fairness — this should be protected as Relias modernizes scheduling.
Clinical Judgment
Clinician-schedulers understand ED rhythm, provider dynamics, and what a realistic schedule feels like.
Where Manual Scheduling Breaks Across 32 Sites
There are too many variables that change every month for humans to optimize schedules manually.
- —20–25 providers involved, which is very expensive and gives those providers less flexibility/time to work shifts
- —Manual errors occur today, such as double-booking shifts or entering the wrong schedule into WhenToWork
- —Contractual hours, provider cost, and locums usage hard to optimize by hand
- —Shift lengths may need to change based on the providers staffed
- —Humans naturally over- and understaff because they can't weigh every variable at once
Schedule
Human schedulers cannot manually hold every variable at once.
Data-driven Scheduling for Relias
Describe's AI generates optimized schedules by analyzing Relias' operational data and provider preferences — turning what schedulers hold in their heads into a system that scales.
Site-specific models trained on Relias' historic demand that deliver hourly volume forecasts.
Staff to Patient Demand — Not Historical Assumptions
Instead of fixed templates, Describe can evenly distribute workload across providers and minimize cost by using AI to understand whether the shift structure itself is efficient — analyzing predicted volume, site needs, and availability.
Key takeaway
Scheduling more efficiently means matching provider coverage to actual demand — so Relias can reduce waste, protect patient care, and give providers more time off.
AI-optimized scheduling keeps coverage closer to actual arrivals.
Relias-Specific AI Use Cases
Centralized Scheduling Without Losing Local Judgment
Describe stores provider preferences, site-specific rules, contractual obligations, credentials, cost, and scheduler intuition so Relias can move from 20–25 local schedulers toward 1 centralized scheduler. Describe can also enforces availability rules for providers to ensure proper coverage.
A central scheduler can manage more sites without needing every detail to live in 20 provider's heads.
Minimize Locums by Placing Existing Providers First
Describe knows each provider's contract and associated cost — so it can prioritize lower-cost eligible providers before using locums.
Reduce avoidable locums usage while protecting provider happiness, fairness, and coverage.
Productivity-Aware Provider Pairing
Using productivity metrics, Describe avoids risky pairings — never two historically slower providers during peak — and pairs newer physicians with faster, experienced ones to support onboarding. Describe analyzes provider performance patterns and helps pair clinicians who work well together.
Know Whether a Candidate's Ideal Schedule Can Work
If a candidate wants 6 shifts in a row, limited weekends, or specific sites, Describe can simulate whether that request is feasible before Relias makes a promise.
Better recruiting conversations, data-backed commitments, stronger retention.
An In-Person Implementation Approach
Describe's 3-month scheduling pilot pairs Relias with a dedicated, in-person Implementation Engineer who will help run a side-by-side comparison of Describe vs. your current process, starting with one site cluster (e.g. Dr. Pond's sites).
Discovery & Data Setup
Gather roster, templates, contracts, cost data, locums usage, rules, preferences, holiday logic, and historical volume. Capture what lives in schedulers' heads.
AI Scheduler Configuration
Customize Describe around Relias' goals: provider happiness, fairness, locums reduction, central scheduling, shift-template efficiency, and cross-site coverage.
Month 1 Schedule Generation
MONTH 1 VALUEDescribe generates real schedules in Month 1 so Relias can compare it against the manual process.
Weekly Feedback
Meet weekly with Relias' core team to review progress and gather feedback.
Expand Region-by-Region
Once schedule quality is proven in the pilot region, expand to additional Relias sites.
ROI: Better Schedules That Improve Margin
Describe improves margin by reducing clinician scheduling time, minimizing avoidable locums usage, and creating efficient shift templates around actual demand.
Estimated Scheduling Cost Today
Based on Dr. Pond's estimate that at least 20–25 providers are involved in scheduling:
Proof from Baptist Health
5-site ED group using Describe scheduling.
Describe pays for itself by removing just a few unnecessary shifts per month.
Scheduling Is Where We Start
Once Describe is integrated into scheduling, Relias can expand the same operating system into credentialing, payroll, provider scorecards, and financial intelligence.
- Provider onboarding
- Document tracking
- Site-specific requirements
- Shift-based pay
- RVU / productivity calculations
- Productivity & throughput
- Site-level performance
- Provider trends & action plans
- Revenue leakage alerts
- Billing vendor scorecards
- Margin protection recommendations
from now
Scheduling is centralized with little-to-zero provider involvement. Relias has a repeatable scheduling process that increases provider happiness.