Since 1897, Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City has been the pediatric provider of choice for families throughout Missouri and Kansas. Its hospitals and clinics are the region’s exclusive pediatric medical center and health care network. This leading health care provider is a not-for-profit hospital, providing more than $12 million in charity care a year. The Children’s Mercy health care system includes outpatient clinics in midtown and Johnson County, Kan., a state-of-the-art, 194-bed hospital in Kansas City and outreach clinics in outlying communities.

Children’s Mercy Hospital was in need of an easy to use online system to coordinate all of their room scheduling for both the educational and corporate aspects of the hospitals business. Children’s Mercy hired AllofE solutions to implement SchedCheK. One of the modules within this product suite is RMtraK. This module has the capability to manage all corporate, recreational and academic resources, as well as coordinate procedures, manage services and much more.

Children’s Mercy chose RMtraK to take complete control over all their specific room tracking, scheduling and reserving needs:

• Web based system to allow for anytime, anywhere access.
• Automatic email reminders 24 hours prior to each event time.
• Room descriptions that include, TV/VCR/Screen, Intranet/Internet, Computer access, and Teleconference capability.
• Security with multiple access levels for administrators, power users, and end users.
• Scheduling validation to prevent overbooking.
• Install blackout period: Education department reserves all rights to rooms first, and then all others can reserve rooms.
• Ability to generate reports displaying all meetings and room locations for each day, by room and meeting name, and reports by week month and year for each room.
• Textbox feature to enter instructions for Security, Catering, AV and Environmental Science departments with automatic email to catering department notifying them of the event.
• Provide templates with different options for room reservations.

AllofE’s programmers began by taking the RMtraK application and customizing it to meet the specific needs of Children’s Mercy. Contained in the application are options to add and delete rooms for scheduling, and within those room’s options to manage multiple layouts, and create color coding for floor plans in addition to checking for scheduling conflicts. There are also very extensive email features that generate automatic emails reminding participants 24 hours prior to each meeting as well as notifying participants if a meeting is canceled or postponed.

AllofE then designed templates for various reservations scenarios to book rooms from: the option to book rooms for multiple occurrences, multiple dates or construct a permanent schedule. The functionality to view all resources in a particular asset category and select resources from a group or whole listing of resources was also added. The system allowed Children’s Mercy to customize each report and generate new statements to accommodate a range of organizational and resource materials.

Another important aspect of this project was the security feature provided by RMtraK. The multi-tiered security allows Administrators to schedule meetings with specified attendees and gives users the ability to view personal, public and closed events and schedule reservations. In addition, all rooms are assigned to power users who have the ability to overwrite all scheduling discrepancies.

RMtraK provided Children’s Mercy with a tool to decrease reservation conflicts in meetings, events and classrooms along with a user-friendly scheduling and availability tracking process. With new tracking abilities the effectiveness of resource management helped them to automate and streamline the reservation process. By maintaining the organized resource analyses through reporting capabilities Children’s Mercy Hospital could experience enhanced business analysis and improved internal efficiency.