MedPOINT gains a bird’s eye view of its team with a contest-winning solution

MedPOINT Management helps Independent Physician Associations (IPAs) and hospitals reduce medical costs and improve the quality of health care through managed care expertise. The family-owned organisation provides administrative services to free up doctors with the goal to provide outstanding customer service and drive innovation in the healthcare industry. 

For a company dealing with large, complex teams and time-sensitive projects, seamless collaboration and transparency are of utmost importance. “Our department has 12 different sub-teams, which makes it challenging to track employee availability,” explains Melanie Corbin, Senior Supervisor of Business Operations at MedPOINT Management. “We were tracking paid time off (PTO) days in a joint calendar and it got a little messy. So, we started looking for a single place where we could quickly look up which team member was available for specific projects.”

Looking for inspiration

Corbin had previously relied on Smartsheet for automating workflows, setting up alerts and reminders to cut down on repetitive tasks and gain full visibility on each project with dashboards. As a Smartsheet two-time ‘Overachiever’ (a designation by Smartsheet for innovators), Corbin is a big believer in Smartsheet templates.

“Templates are a great place to start when you are creating a solution,” she says. “Why reinvent the wheel? I use the Template Gallery very often for inspiration to see how other teams are dealing with common issues and learn from them.” 

To create a streamlined workflow at MedPOINT, Corbin decided to create a solution for tracking PTO days and team availability.

Team members can now quickly insert and categorize their days off with the new solution. With the manager and department-level views, a calendar view, and color-coded teams, MedPOINT managers could now look at past trends and future availability for every sub-team and employee.

“Because it’s very straightforward to use, it has been quite easily accepted by the entire staff,” says Corbin. 

More clarity in decision-making

The solution was quickly adopted by MedPOINT’s entire IT department, giving employees up-to-date information on the availability of their reports and peers. “We can see if people are away and why—whether they’re on leave or at the doctor’s for example. That’s useful to know when you’re trying to contact them at the office and they are not answering,” says Corbin.

“It has become a one-stop shop for our entire department to see what’s going on internally. We can also spot team shortages in particular projects and use it to justify staffing needs.” 

Besides that, employees use Smartsheet apps like Pivot to summarise large sets of data and make meaningful comparisons between the work trends of each employee. 

Contest-winning template

As evidence of its success, the solution designed by Corbin’s team was a winner of Smartsheet’s ENGAGE’22 Template Contest, which awards four solutions that have empowered the workplace in a simple and effective way. To help other users empower their workplace and improve how work is planned, managed, and visualized, Corbin converted her solution into a template, now available for users to download in the Smartsheet Template Gallery. 

Promoting innovation

Moving forward, MedPOINT will continue enhancing its team visibility. “We are always trying to improve our processes,” says Corbin. “Right now, we are creating new staffing models that will show aggregate data—for example, how many hours we are losing due to power outages and employee absence. With its automation capabilities, there’s just so much that we can do with Smartsheet to improve productivity and reporting. This is why I always urge other teams to dig in and discover what they can achieve with this solution."

Click here to download Corbin’s template and share it with your team