The AI Operating System Behind MEMA's Next Stage of Growth
Starting with scheduling — helping MEMA scale across more EDs, more providers, and more operational complexity without adding administrative burden.
Describe
MEMA Is Entering a New Operating Phase
MEMA is growing from 6 EDs to 14 EDs over the next five years, with ~180 providers today. Growth changes the math: more sites means more schedules, more provider requests, more fairness questions, more shift-template and operational complexity.
Advance Schedule Visibility
MEMA's schedules are published far in advance, giving providers predictability for vacations, family events, and life outside medicine.
Provider Predictability
That predictability is a real recruiting and retention advantage — and it should be protected as MEMA modernizes scheduling.
Where the Current Model Breaks as MEMA Scales
Scheduling is becoming too complex for any human or static tool to optimize manually.
- —Too many provider trades after the schedule is released
- —Block templates create rigidity that's hard to bend per site
- —New FSEDs carry lower volume and coverage must be distributed fairly
- —Shift lengths may need to evolve from 8 hours to a mix of 8s, 10s, and 12s
- —Humans naturally over- and understaff because they can't weigh every variable at once
Schedule
Data-driven Scheduling for MEMA
Describe's AI generates optimized schedules by analyzing MEMA's operational data and provider preferences — turning what schedulers hold in their heads into a system that scales.
Site-specific models trained on MEMA's historic demand that deliver hourly volume forecasts.
Staff to Patient Demand — Not Historical Assumptions
Instead of fixed templates, Describe uses expected arrival curves to determine when coverage is actually needed. Start times are demand-aligned, with the right mix of 8s, 10s, and 12s.
Key takeaway
Fixed templates can create both overstaffing during low-demand hours and understaffing during peak periods.
AI-optimized scheduling keeps coverage closer to actual arrivals.
MEMA-Specific AI Use Cases
Pediatric Volume Intelligence
Describe predicts pediatric volume by site and hour, identifies adult EDs with enough under-21 volume to justify pediatric coverage, and recommends where pediatric physicians can be deployed beyond the dedicated department.
New Freestanding ED Fairness
As MEMA opens freestanding EDs with lower volume and RVU opportunity, Describe distributes those shifts fairly — so the same providers aren't repeatedly assigned to lower-volume sites.
Productivity-Aware Provider Pairing
Using patients-per-hour and throughput, Describe avoids risky pairings — never two historically slower providers during peak — and pairs newer physicians with faster, experienced ones to support onboarding.
Holiday & High-Demand Day Fairness
Super Bowl Sunday, Easter, July 4th matter differently to each provider. Describe lets providers rank high-demand days, then balances those preferences fairly over time.
An In-Person Implementation Approach
Describe's 3-month scheduling pilot pairs MEMA with a dedicated Implementation Engineer who will be in-person in Charlotte to customize the AI scheduler and support onboarding.
Discovery & Data Setup
Gather schedules, roster, templates, contracts, rules, preferences, holiday logic, and historical volume. Capture what lives in schedulers' heads.
AI Scheduler Configuration
Customize Describe around MEMA's goals: fairness, staffing efficiency, fewer trades, site coverage, and provider preferences.
Month 1 Schedule Generation
MONTH 1 VALUEDescribe generates schedules in Month 1, so MEMA can compare AI output against the current process and evaluate improvements early.
Weekly Feedback
Meet weekly with MEMA's core team to review progress, gather feedback, adjust rules, and refine schedule outputs.
Hybrid Provider Rollout
Roll out with minimal friction. Keep resistant providers closer to block/template scheduling while offering availability-based flexibility to those who want it.
Pricing & ROI: Built to Pay for Itself
Includes AI scheduling, volume forecasting, shift optimization, analytics, implementation, and 24/7 ongoing support.
Describe pays for itself by conservatively removing just ~5 shifts (or 5 shifts worth of hours) from the monthly template — a very small percentage of MEMA's total scheduled hours.
Results from 5-Site ED Group (Baptist Health)
Scheduling Is Where We Start
Once Describe is integrated into scheduling, MEMA can expand the same operating system into credentialing, payroll, provider scorecards, and financial intelligence.
- Provider onboarding
- Document tracking
- Site-specific requirements
- Shift-based pay
- RVU / productivity calculations
- Paychex integration
- Productivity & throughput
- Site-level performance
- Provider trends & action plans
- Revenue leakage alerts
- Billing vendor scorecards
- Margin protection recommendations
from now
Schedules still come out months ahead, volume-based staffing is routine, credentialing workflows centralized, payroll automation in place.
MEMA is ready to support the next wave of growth.