What is AI scheduling? A replacement for ShiftAdmin, QGenda, and Schedule Forward

Describe is a scheduling platform

Describe is AI scheduling software for emergency medicine groups and urgent cares. It's the system your schedulers use to collect availability, build the schedule, publish it, and manage swaps afterward. It replaces tools like ShiftAdmin, QGenda, and Schedule Forward rather than sitting on top of them.

What "AI scheduling" actually means

Most scheduling software stores your rules and preferences, then leaves a person to build the schedule. Auto-generate features exist, but many groups stop using them because the output needs so much fixing.

AI scheduling means the software builds the schedule for you. Describe checks billions of possible combinations and picks the one that meets the most provider preferences without breaking a single hard rule, such as contracted hours, rest time, or credentials. A full month takes up to 10 minutes. Your scheduler reviews it, makes any edits, and publishes.

It isn't a chatbot guessing at assignments. Hard rules are always followed, and every warning shows which provider, date, and preference is affected, so you can see exactly why someone landed where they did.

What it uses that legacy tools don't

Beyond availability and preferences, Describe also uses:

• Provider performance, such as length of stay, patient satisfaction, and patients per hour, to place providers where they do best
• Patient-volume forecasts by site and hour, to staff each shift to expected demand
• Pay rates and differentials, to keep staffing costs down
• Fairness across nights, weekends, and holidays, tracked over any date range

How it compares

ShiftAdmin is being sunset after its acquisition by QGenda, so many ED groups are choosing a replacement now. QGenda is a broad workforce platform used across many specialties. Schedule Forward and similar tools focus on preference collection and publishing. All of them keep the scheduler doing most of the building.

Describe is built for emergency medicine, and the schedule comes out nearly ready to publish. See Describe vs QGenda and the best ShiftAdmin alternatives for side-by-side comparisons.

Results

Baptist Health Urgent Care went from 3–5 days to about 4 hours per schedule across 8 sites and reported $28K a month saved on overstaffing. Emergent Physicians cut each schedule from 8–10 hours to 1–2 and met twice as many provider preferences.

Switching

We move your rules, preferences, and schedules over from your current system, and each group gets a dedicated support engineer. Most of the work happens up front, getting your scheduler's knowledge out of their head and into the system, so the first generated schedules are usable.