In many organizations, success requires balancing structure and adaptability. This is especially true with Our Birthing Center, an organization which operates two free-standing birthing centers: In Hudson County, NYC and Morris County, New Jersey. The centers offer another alternative to hospital and home birth for expectant parents in the region, offering a more relaxed, spa-like setting. On-staff nurses work with care providers, usually midwives, to provide family-centered care for low risk pregnant women. They needed a way to oversee the many details and adjust quickly to changes:
We were searching for a solution how to manage our Nurses On Call schedule, Room bookings, etc. that can be shared by multiple users and came across Teamup. It has been working wonderfully for us.
-Ari Saltz, Co-Founder & Managing Director of Our Birthing Center
Daily operations at the birth center
A typical day involves coordinating staff breaks and preparing for early labor arrivals. Nurses and other staff members need to coordinate quickly when labor begins. Cleaning staff are on call to sanitize and prepare rooms after patients leave, getting everything ready for the next family. Additionally, there are regularly scheduled classes for expecting parents and tours for families considering the center. All these activities need careful planning around patient care.
Track work and activities
Administrators have three main areas to oversee: patient information, staffing, and activities. For new patients, they need to collect the necessary information and add the due date to the calendar. For staffing, they need to look ahead at open shifts and see which ones need to be covered. They also need to schedule staff meetings. For events, there are new patient tours, ongoing classes, and other facility events to be scheduled. It’s important that these events not cause a disruption to patient care. Some classes might be held in a birthing suite, which then makes it unavailable for patient use. So it’s crucial to make sure events aren’t scheduled too close together and avoid overlapping needs for the birthing suites.
Prior to Teamup, administrators had to handle these areas through a variety of inputs like email, messages, voicemails and phone calls, notes between staff. Each input method was its own little silo; gathering all the information, following up, checking details, and ensuring that everything was up-to-date could take a lot of time.
Make availability visible
For these birthing centers to run smoothly, key people need to be able to quickly see availability for staff members and rooms. Administrators need to ensure there’s a nurse on call for each shift. Midwives need to see which nurse to contact when a patient is ready to come in. Nurses need to coordinate quickly with other staff to be prepared for patients. Cleaning staff need to know which rooms to prioritize in their cleaning rounds. Without a hub for all this information, it’s up to the administrator to gather these details, update the calendar, and communicate changes to the rest of the team. They needed a way to streamline the process while making accurate availability visible for everyone involved, at the right level for their role.
The ability to create different calendars with color coding and different users with different access is what is most important to us.
Match availability with work
Even with good planning there can be disruptions and changes. A nurse might call in sick, leaving a gap in the schedule that needs to be filled immediately. If several cleaning staff members request PTO, they still have make sure the cleaning needs can still be handled. Communicating with staff members about their availability can take a lot of time; without a good system, administrators might spend hours each week on emails, messages, and phone calls finding a replacement for a shift or ensuring that the enough people are working over the holidays.
All these separate parts need to come together in one system. Here’s how Teamup provides a streamlined way to bring all the details together, make information visible, and keep everyone updated efficiently.
The Teamup solution: Structure and flexibility
Organize with color-coding
Organization starts with separating key activities into distinct, color-coded sub-calendars:
- A gray calendar for patient estimated due dates.
- Room bookings are shown in red, easy to spot.
- All Nurses On Call are green, while the Open shifts calendar is purple.
Color-coding makes it easy to see what’s happening at a glance while keeping schedules clear and organized. With the information made visual, it’s easy to see availability with a glance, instead of combing through papers or email threads.
Delegate scheduling
With all the schedule information in one place, every person knows where to go for updated information; it’s centralized and accessible. The administrator can set up customized access for each person so they can see what matters for their role and be able to update their own availability. For example, nurses can view and claim open shifts directly on the calendar, eliminating the need for back-and-forth communications.
Here’s how the permissions are set up:
- Nurses: They have Modify access to the Nurses > On Call and Open calendars, so they can claim shifts on the Open calendar by adding their name and phone number and moving the shift to the On Call calendar. They have Modify access to the Room Bookings calendars so they can book rooms for patients and Modify-my-events permission to the Vacation calendar, so they can add travel plans or days off.
- Cleaning techs: They also have Modify-my-events permission to the Vacation calendar, so they can update their availability, and Read-only access to the Room Bookings calendars so they can see which rooms need to be cleaned.
Letting nurses and cleaning techs update their own availability reduces a lot of administrative work. Plus, it’s simpler and less error-prone. Instead of messages and notes passing from one person to another, each individual can quickly update the schedule with their own information. It’s efficient and keeps the availability accurate and up-to-date.
Protect privacy

A midwife’s customized calendar access only the Nurse On Call schedule; they can call in from the app with a couple of taps.
Outside of staff communication, there are also the midwives to consider. They run independent practices and are the primary care providers for the patients. They need to coordinate with the birthing center, but they’re not staff members. So some information needs to be kept confidential. But they also need a quick, reliable way to communicate with staff on duty.Each midwife can have customized access that gives them Read-only permission only to the On Call calendar, as shown above in the Teamup app. They can check which nurse is on call when one of their patients is ready to come into the center and get in contact with a couple of taps, right from their phone.
Optimize efficiency
Ari and the team at Our Birthing Center have done a great job setting up a simple, effective system for scheduling. By allowing users to access the specific information relevant to their roles—without the need for a central “switchboard” administrator—each person involved is freed up to take appropriate actions, quickly and efficiently. Instead of chasing details, shuffling papers, or repeating status changes, the whole team can focus on their mission: providing excellent care in a supportive environment as families welcome new life into the world.
Here are a few suggestions for how this system could be further improved:
- Give each room or suite its own sub-calendar and assign them with similar colors. Set these sub-calendars to disallow overlapping events. This will automatically prevent anydouble-bookings from being added to the calendar.
- Group similar calendars in folders for better organization. It’s easy to toggle an entire folder out of view when needed.
- Adapt the built-in event fields to capture the relevant information. For example, the Where field is not needed (all events happen at the birthing center); it could be repurposed to hold a phone number of the nurse on duty. Midwives could quickly tap the field in the Teamup app to make the call.
- Add custom fields to make information capture easier and more consistent. A choice field could be used to capture the midwife providing care to each patient. Since the center works with a limited number of midwife practices, they could create a prefilled option for each one.
Balancing the unpredictability of childbirth with routine scheduling and daily operations is no easy job. And in many other roles, the same balance between structure and flexibility is essential. With the ability to customize access, color-code schedules, and provide real-time updates, Teamup can help you manage ever-changing schedules and real-world complexity.