Medical staff scheduling software that knows what a licence is
MedAligna builds, checks and publishes clinical staff schedules, from a single clinic to a multi-site health system. It refuses assignments when a licence or certification has expired, enforces minimum rest, overtime and nurse-to-patient ratios, runs on-call rotations, and lets staff swap shifts from their phones, with every swap rule-checked before a manager ever sees it.
From $99/month per location · No sales call · No card to start
| Staff | Mon 15 | Tue 16 | Wed 17 | Thu 18 | Fri 19 | Sat 20 | Sun 21 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A. OkaforRN | 07–19 Day shift | 07–19 Day shift | 19–07 Night shift | 19–07 Night shift | |||
M. DelgadoRN | 15–23 Evening shift | 15–23 Evening shift | 07–19 Day shiftRN licence expires Jun 18 | 07–19 Day shift | |||
J. WhitfieldLPN | 19–07 Night shift | 07–19 Day shift | 07–19 Day shift | 07–19 Day shift | 24h On-call shift | ||
S. RamanathanCNA | 07–19 Day shift | 07–19 Day shift48h this week | 07–19 Day shift | 15–23 Evening shift | 15–23 Evening shift | ||
T. BergströmRN | 19–07 Night shift | 19–07 Night shift | 19–07 Night shift | 19–07 Night shift | |||
| Coverage | 3/3fully staffed | 4/4fully staffed | 3/3fully staffed | 3/4understaffed | 4/4fully staffed | 4/4fully staffed | 2/3understaffed |
The red badge is a nurse whose RN licence expires mid-shift. The assignment is refused before anyone is left short on the floor.
- 0
- compliance rules checked on every assignment
- 0
- care settings: clinic, hospital, LTC, home care
- 0 days
- free trial, no card required
- 0%
- of schedule changes are audit-logged
Healthcare workforce management software has a hole in the middle
At one end sit QGenda, symplr and Lightning Bolt: genuinely deep on clinical rules, sold through a sales process, priced against a health system's capital budget and delivered over a six-month implementation. At the other sit Deputy, When I Work and Connecteam: excellent, cheap, instantly self-serve, and completely unaware that a nursing licence exists. They will schedule a nurse whose licence lapsed last Tuesday without a murmur.
Everyone in between (the twelve-provider clinic, the ICU that wants to fix its own roster without raising an RFP, the ninety-bed skilled-nursing facility, the home care agency running forty caregivers across a county) has had to choose between a tool that ignores them and a tool that does not understand them. MedAligna is the third option: enterprise rule depth, bought like a SaaS product.
Credentials that block, not remind
Checked against the end of the shift, not today. A licence expiring Thursday cannot be scheduled for Friday: the assignment is refused, with the reason on the cell.
Rules that survive a night shift
Rest, overtime and consecutive days computed on real elapsed time. A 19:00–07:00 night is eleven hours the week the clocks go forward and thirteen the week they go back, and payroll sees the same number.
Swaps staff actually trust
Two nurses claim the last open shift in the same second: exactly one gets it, and the other is told the truth immediately. Enforced by a database row lock, not a hopeful check in application code.
Credential tracking software that blocks the schedule, not just your inbox
Most tools email you a reminder that a licence is expiring, then let you schedule the nurse anyway. That is a notification, not a control.
MedAligna checks every required credential against the END of the shift, never against today. A licence that lapses on Thursday cannot be scheduled for Friday: the assignment is refused at the moment the scheduler clicks it, with the reason written on the cell. If a manager genuinely needs to override that (the renewal came through by phone, the paperwork is a day behind), she can, and the override is recorded, attributed, and surfaced to administrators, because a knowing exception and an accident are not the same event and should never look the same in an audit.
The credential wall covers state licences, BLS, ACLS, PALS, TB tests, immunisations, DEA registrations, and board certifications, with documents attached and verification status held per record. Expiry alerts fire at 60, 30, 14, and 7 days to both the staff member and an admin digest, so a lapse becomes a scheduling non-event instead of a Monday-morning emergency and a hole in the roster.
Nurse-to-patient ratio software, with acuity and HPRD
Coverage is not a headcount. Four nurses on a unit of forty is a very different shift from four nurses on a unit of twenty.
Enter the census per unit and shift and the grid shows required staffing against actual, with acuity weighting, because residents in a skilled-nursing facility are not interchangeable units of work. Ratio rules ship as configurable presets, and the coverage row turns red the moment a day falls short, rather than at month-end when someone finally runs a report on a period nobody can change any more.
In long-term care the same data produces HPRD (hours per resident day) and the quarterly CMS Payroll-Based Journal submission. PBJ is the single reason most skilled-nursing facilities buy scheduling software at all, and here it is generated from hours you have already captured, not re-keyed by hand into a separate system the week it is due.
Shift swaps and self-scheduling your staff will actually trust
Self-scheduling collapses the first time two nurses claim the same shift and one of them is quietly un-assigned an hour later.
When two people tap “claim” on the last open night in the same second, exactly one of them gets it. That is enforced with a row lock inside the database, not a check in application code, because an application check loses that race every time, and the nurse who was told yes and then told no does not come back to the feature, or recommend it to anyone.
Swaps are rule-checked before they are even offered: the engine will not surface a trade to a counterparty who would end up double-booked, short of rest, or out of credential. Managers approve whatever survives that filter, or switch on auto-approval for swaps where every rule passes. Partial swaps (“take my last six hours”) split the assignment cleanly, because that is how coverage actually gets arranged at 6am.
Staff rostering software that survives a night shift and a time change
Rest, overtime and consecutive days are where scheduling software quietly gets it wrong, and where the damage lands on somebody's payslip.
Every duration in MedAligna is computed on real elapsed time. A 19:00–07:00 night shift is eleven hours the week the clocks go forward and thirteen the week they go back, and the overtime projection, the labour-cost estimate and the payroll export all agree on that number. Tools that subtract wall-clock times get this wrong twice a year, and the nurse discovers it on payday.
Thirteen rules run on every single assignment: double-booking, minimum rest, maximum shift length, consecutive days, hours against both the organisation's cap and the individual's own contract, ACGME averaging windows, credential validity, skill and position eligibility, approved and pending time off, stated availability, and employment status. They run in the browser as you drag, and again on the server before the write lands, because a browser can be lied to and a database cannot.
Clinical staff scheduling for every setting that runs a roster
One clinic or fifteen sites. The platform is the same; only the rules you switch on change.
Shift scheduling software for medical practices, live the same afternoon
No implementation project. No consultant. No kick-off call.
- 01
Import your staff
Upload a CSV or paste straight from a spreadsheet. Roles, contracts, licences and expiry dates come across with them.
About 20 minutes - 02
Set the rules once
Coverage per shift, minimum rest, overtime caps, ratio rules, who may work which role. Presets exist for ACGME and common ratio regimes.
Presets, then adjust - 03
Build and publish
Drag, or generate a draft from a rotation. Conflicts surface as you go, and the moment you publish, the current version is what every member of staff sees.
Same afternoon
Where the money actually goes
Every agency shift is a shift you already had staff for
An agency bills your nurse's rate plus a markup. Filling the same shift from your own team, your float pool, or a sister site costs you the rate, and nothing else. MedAligna works down that list before it ever lets you pick up the phone.
Use your own numbers
Nothing is sent anywhere. This is arithmetic, running in your browser.
Agency fills it
$745
- Nurse is paid
- $540
- Agency keeps (38%)
- $205
Your own staff fills it
$540
- Nurse is paid
- $540
- Middleman
- $0
Difference on one shift
$205
At 4 agency shifts a week, that is $42,682 a year, for shifts your own people, float pool, or another one of your sites could have covered.
What this is and isn't.This is your arithmetic, not our claim: nurse rate × markup × hours. It assumes a shift your own team could have covered; some genuinely cannot be, and for those, agency is the right answer. It excludes overtime premiums, benefits loading, and state taxes on the agency bill, all of which vary and most of which make the gap wider, not narrower. We do not publish a “customers save X%” figure because we have not measured one yet. When we have, we will publish that instead.
MedAligna escalates an open shift through your own staff, then your float pool, then your other locations, and shows you the agency spend it avoided.
Where each tool lands
An honest table. The enterprise platforms are genuinely good at clinical rules; they are simply not sold to, or priced for, most of the people who need them.
| Capability | MedAligna | Deputy / When I Work | QGenda / symplr |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blocks a shift when a licence or certification has expired | Yes | No | Yes |
| Nurse-to-patient ratio compliance, with acuity weighting | Yes | No | Yes |
| ACGME duty-hour limits (80h averaged over four weeks) | Yes | No | Partial |
| On-call rotations with escalation and equity tracking | Yes | No | Yes |
| Rule-checked shift swaps and self-scheduling | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Minimum-rest and overtime enforcement (DST-correct) | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Home-care visit scheduling with travel time | Yes | No | No |
| CMS Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) export | Yes | No | Partial |
| Self-serve: sign up and publish today, no sales call | Yes | Yes | No |
| Published pricing | Yes | Yes | No |
Compiled from each vendor's public documentation and pricing pages, July 2026. Deputy, When I Work, QGenda and symplr are trademarks of their respective owners; MedAligna is not affiliated with any of them. If anything here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Priced in public
Per location, per month. Fourteen-day trial on every plan, and everything you put in comes back out whenever you want it.
Starter
$99/mo per location
Up to 30 staff
- Schedule builder & publishing
- Credential tracking + expiry blocking
- Compliance reporting
- Shift swaps & open shifts
- On-call rotations + public board
- Staff mobile app & calendar sync
Pro
$149/mo per location
Up to 75 staff
- Everything in Starter
- Automatic schedule generation
- Ratio, acuity & HPRD compliance
- Time & attendance + payroll export
- Home-care visit scheduling
- Self-scheduling windows
Enterprise
$249/mo per location
Unlimited staff
- Everything in Pro
- Unlimited staff & locations
- REST API & signed webhooks
- Priority support
Three or more locations? 20% off. Annual billing is two months free.
Questions people actually ask
- What is medical staff scheduling software?
- Medical staff scheduling software builds and publishes the working roster for a clinical team: who works which shift, on which unit, in which role. Unlike a generic shift scheduler, it understands healthcare rules: it verifies licences and certifications before assigning anyone, enforces minimum rest between shifts, tracks nurse-to-patient ratios, manages on-call rotations, and rule-checks every shift swap before a manager sees it.
- Is this the same as medical scheduling software for patient appointments?
- No, and it is the most common mix-up in this category. MedAligna schedules your STAFF: which nurse works Tuesday night. It does not book patient appointments. If you need appointment booking, you want a practice-management or EHR scheduling product instead. Both get called 'medical scheduling software' or 'medical scheduler software', unfortunately, so check which half a vendor means before you sit through the demo.
- Is MedAligna only for small practices?
- No. A single clinic and a fifteen-site health system run on the same platform: multi-location organisations, departments and units, cross-facility on-call services, float pools, per-diem and agency staff are all first-class. What is small is the buying process: there is no sales call, no RFP, and no six-month implementation. A hospital department can sign up on a Tuesday and publish a schedule the same Tuesday.
- How is this different from Deputy or When I Work?
- Those are good general-purpose shift schedulers, but they have no concept of a nursing licence, a BLS certification, a patient-to-nurse ratio, an ACGME duty-hour limit, or an on-call escalation chain. They will happily schedule a nurse whose licence expired last week. MedAligna refuses to, and tells you exactly why.
- How is this different from QGenda, symplr, or Amion?
- On rule depth, comparable. On everything else, not. Those platforms are sold through a sales process with annual contracts and implementation projects, and are priced accordingly. MedAligna is self-serve with published prices: $99 to $249 per location per month, a 14-day trial, and nobody will call you.
- Can staff use it on their phones?
- Yes. Staff install MedAligna to their home screen and it behaves like an app: their schedule, open shifts to claim, swap requests, and time-off decisions, always the current published version. Nothing to download from an app store and nothing to update.
- What about HIPAA?
- HIPAA governs protected health information: data that identifies a person AND relates to their care. MedAligna schedules staff, not patients, so we hold none of it: no patient names, no diagnoses, no charts, no notes. What we store is employment data (who works Tuesday night, whose licence expires in March), which is not PHI under HIPAA, even when the employer is a hospital. The practical upshot is the strongest answer available to a security review: if MedAligna were breached, your patients would not be in the blast radius, because their data was never here. Home care is the one case that works differently, since a client's name and address tied to receipt of care is PHI; if that's your deployment, talk to us and we'll walk you through how it's handled. Full detail on the security page.
- Do you have a network of agency clinicians we can hire from?
- No, and that is deliberate. Staffing marketplaces place strangers into your facility and take a cut of their pay, which makes them an employer, with the licensing and liability that follows. MedAligna does the opposite: it fills an open shift from your OWN people first, then your float pool, then your other locations, and only tells you to call an agency when nobody internal can legally work it. Most tools skip straight to the agency, which is the most expensive answer, and that is where the money goes.
- What does it integrate with?
- Hours export as a timesheet CSV of real elapsed time (Gusto reads it directly through Smart Import, and it carries the columns any payroll system's import step asks for), plus the CMS Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) XML that skilled-nursing facilities file quarterly, generated from those same captured hours and validated against the CMS schema. Staff schedules sync to Google, Outlook and Apple calendars through a personal iCal feed, and every credential and schedule can be exported to CSV or JSON at any time. Enterprise adds a REST API that reads your schedule, staff, credentials, open shifts and on-call chain, plus signed outbound webhooks that tell your systems the moment a shift is claimed or a swap goes through, so anything else you run can stay in step without polling us.
- Does MedAligna run payroll?
- No, deliberately. We capture hours and export them: as a timesheet CSV your payroll system imports, and as the CMS Payroll-Based Journal file for skilled-nursing facilities. Your payroll provider turns those hours into money. What we guarantee is that the hours are right: a 19:00–07:00 night shift is thirteen real hours the week the clocks go back, and we export thirteen.
- What does it cost?
- $99, $149, or $249 per month per location, depending on team size and features. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, no card required, and three or more locations get 20% off. The full price list is public; nothing is hidden behind a quote form.
Publish next month's schedule this afternoon
Import your staff from a spreadsheet, pick a rotation, publish. No demo to sit through, no contract to sign, and nobody will call you.