Inefficient Patient Assignment Processes, Fallout from Provider Turnover, and Complex Workflows are Top of Mind for Hospitals Today

Last month, I attended the Society of Hospital Medicine’s four-day Leadership Academy in Arizona, where Hospitalists across the country came together to gain essential leadership skills not often taught in medical schools or residencies.  

Scott Hopkins, a Regional Sales Manager here at Medaptus, and I had the pleasure of speaking with many attendees who stopped by the Medaptus table about how they’re currently managing patient assignments and the challenges they’re facing. 

Some common challenges came up again and again in this conversation. I thought I’d share them with you here as you may be able to relate to some or all of them.  

Four common patient assignment challenges among Hospitalists today: 

1. Creating morning rounding lists is a time-consuming and inefficient process. Many are using Excel spreadsheets, some are still using pen and paper, or a combination of both. Regardless of how they’re doing it today, most of the Hospitalists we spoke to wish there to be a better, faster, more intelligent way to manage patient distribution that would improve continuity of care and patient throughput.
2. Burnout, provider turnover and strikes are real issues today that put hospitals at risk of losing the staff responsible for patient assignment. When the physicians, nurses or administrative staff who do rounding list creation leave, all of their knowledge leaves with them, leading to critical gaps in the assignment process that could affect patient care, not to mention the financial costs to replace and train new staff. 
3. Every hospital has a unique and complex patient assignment process. While this is a widespread belief among the group of Hospitalists we spoke to, over the 20 years Medaptus has been in business, we’ve seen similarities in patient distribution processes from customer to customer, hospital to hospital. We’ve developed a solution to streamline and automate even the most complicated patient assignment processes.
4. There’s a lot of interest in technology to improve patient assignment workflows, but there’s also a hesitancy toward adopting solutions due to past experiences with other vendors. When looking for a patient assignment solution, choosing a vendor that has completed many successful implementations for large hospital groups throughout the country that are getting value out of the software is essential.    

Whether you’re experiencing some, or all these challenges, or some of your own that I didn’t cover here, I’m here to tell you that there is a solution. It’s called Medaptus  Assign. 

The Assign platform is the only intelligent patient assignment solution available to the hospital business. It is designed to match patients with attending or admitting clinicians based on patient type, history, staffing availability, workload constraints, and other factors that make sense for you.  

I’ll share an example of how it has helped Northwell South Shore University Hospital. 

Prior to adopting Assign, Northwell South Shore University Hospital faced many of the challenges I shared earlier. They used Excel and pen and paper to create morning rounding lists. Now, their method is automated, more effective, and efficient, assuring patients’ location and treatment continuity.  

The doctors who oversee patient assignments there shared the following feedback with us: 

“Medaptus helps us ensure continuity of care and that the right people get assigned to the right patients,” says Dr. Sharma, Northwell Health. 

“It takes maybe 10-15 minutes as opposed to three hours. Unanimously across all the hospitalists I’ve worked with, the smiles speak for themselves,” says Dr. Rosenthal, Northwell Health. 

So, if you’re facing the same challenges as the Hospitalists, we spoke to at SHM Leadership Academy and want to understand how to improve your patient assignment process, we’d be happy to have a conversation with you. Get in touch with us.
 

What’s next?   

• Check out A day/night in the life of a nocturnist [Infographic]  
• Download our eBook: The Hidden Costs of Manual Patient Assignment eBook   
• See how Medaptus can help, contact us to book a demo