How Fennimore Health put 31 clinics on one rota app

31 clinics, 31 spreadsheets

Each Fennimore clinic planned its staff rota in its own spreadsheet. Managers copied last week’s file, filled the gaps by phone and emailed the result to payroll, where two people spent two days of every pay period reconciling hours from 31 formats. Nobody could see coverage across a region, and a nurse who picked up shifts at two clinics appeared in two files that disagreed.

The files also held more than they should. Some rotas included appointment counts copied from the scheduling system, which meant patient-related data sat in email attachments.

Built by the people who use it

Priya Raman’s data team connected Chamfer to the scheduling data in BigQuery and set up Stockroom, Chamfer’s managed Postgres, to hold rota data. They imported the 31 spreadsheets in an afternoon. Then they asked two clinic managers to describe the tool they wished they had.

The first Rota Planner came from a single prompt: a week grid of shifts by role, staff chips you can move between days, and a coverage row that turns red when a shift is short. None of the clinic managers had built software before. They described their week in plain words, reviewed each draft on staging and asked for changes the same way, refining it over two weeks. Open shifts now go out as text messages through Twilio, and the first qualified person to reply yes gets the shift.

Access by site, written once

The data team’s condition was simple: a manager should never see staff or appointment numbers from another clinic. They wrote that rule as a Spec in one sentence, and Chamfer applies it at row level to every app that touches rota data. Regional directors see their region. Payroll sees hours but not appointments.

The compliance team reviewed the rule and the first three apps before launch, and approved each release. Access comes from Okta, so when a manager moves to a new clinic, their view moves with them. Every change to a rota is in the Logbook with a name and a timestamp.

“We wrote the privacy rule once, and every app since has followed it,” Priya says. “Nobody has to remember it.”

What changed

• 31 clinics planning rotas in one app, with access by site

• 94% of open shifts filled within 48 hours

• About 5 hours of planning saved per manager each week

Since the Rota Planner, clinic managers have built 11 more apps, from supply orders to a regional coverage dashboard that directors check every Monday. Priya’s team now reviews each new app’s permissions in a weekly 30-minute session instead of building the apps themselves.