What is Scheduled Effective Date?

By default, as soon as the final Approver on an Approval Workflow marks their approval, the pending policy moves to an Active status and will be viewable by all PolicyStat users.

Standard Approval Workflow process

The Scheduled Effective Date feature adds an optional step between the final approval and the Active status. This feature provides the ability to delay the pending policy moving to Active to a specific date or a specific number of days past when that final approval was provided.

Approval Workflow with Scheduled Effective Date

This feature allows for a policy to become active just in time with a new regulation, allow a period for required parties to become trained about the new policy prior to it becoming active (Period of Education), or any other similar reasons.

Please note that for accountability reasons, once a policy completes the workflow and moves to a scheduled status, that version cannot be modified. While it does not yet appear in search results, completion of the Workflow is equivalent to the Active status in that the content is complete.

While in scheduled status, the policy will be visible to users with elevated permissions (Owner, Approver, Area Manager, Site Administrator) under the Scheduled policies report. Users assigned to acknowledge the scheduled version can see the policy.

For information on how to:

• Schedule an Effective Date, see this article
• Assign Acknowledgments to a scheduled policy, see this article
• Review a report of policies scheduled to become effective, see this article
• If necessary, modify your labels to avoid having duplicate dates labeled as "Effective", see this article

Notes to Site Administrators:

Enabling the Feature

Due to the impact of potential label changes, not every site has enabled this feature. If your site does not have this enabled, a Site Administrator will need to enable it via a widget on the Admin tab. For more, see this article.

Site Administrators within connected PolicyStat sites (e.g. - hospital networks) may not see the widget. Due to the impact of the changes, only Site Administrators who have Administrator permissions across all sites in your applicability group will be able to see the widget. If you are uncertain or have questions, please contact support@policystat.com. 

Policy on Policies

If your PolicyStat site makes use of a Policy on Policies, please ensure the content of that policy reflects the changes reflected in the Scheduled Effective Date feature. Thanks!

If you do not currently have one, but would like to, PolicyStat offers this sample outline/template. This sample was provided by a PolicyStat client and has been approved for general distribution.

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This article applies to the following user roles: