Day / Night in the Life of a Nocturnist

The patient assignment process can be difficult and complex, especially when you want to create rounding lists that make sense for physicians and for patient care.

The last thing you want is your physicians rounding on patients across multiple floors or units, missing a patient, or struggling with unevenly balanced workloads. But unfortunately, these challenges are the reality for many hospitalists due to manual patient assignment.

In this infographic, you’ll see a sample day in the life of a nocturnist who is tasked with creating the patient assignment list—and the obstacles they face. Then, learn how we helped nocturnists at Northwell Health improve their manual patient assignment process, reducing the time spent from hours to just minutes.

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Responsibilities & Challenges

Nocturnists

 In many hospitals, nocturnists, nurses, or administrators are responsible for the next day’s patient assignment process in the early hours of the morning. However, manual patient assignment presents many challenges…

Responsibilities

  • Care for patients
  • Admit new patients
  • Manually create patient assignment for the next day’s hospitalists

Challenges of the Manual Patient Assignment Process

Manually Type All Admissions

Assign providers to patients based on the end-of-day census.

Time Lag When List Is Created

  • Doctors and nurses experience delays before being informed.

Patient Attributes Not Evenly Balanced

  • New admits, ICU downgrades, OBS, etc., are not fairly distributed among physicians.

Difficult to Ensure Patients See the Same Provider

  • Jumping from provider to provider can negatively impact patient care.

Difficult to Keep Geography in Mind

  • Manual assignment doesn’t always consider location efficiency.

Schedule Changes Create Manual Updates

  • If a doctor calls in sick or is unavailable, staff must manually update the patient list.

We Helped Northwell’s Nocturnists with Their Patient Assignment Process

Northwell Health nocturnists who oversee the creation of rounding lists experienced many issues with their manual process. After implementing medaptus’ automated patient assignment software (Assign), the right doctors were assigned to the right patients, and the process was expedited significantly.

“All of that takes maybe 10-15 minutes as opposed to three hours like before,” said Dr. Rosenthal. “Unanimously across all the hospitalists I’ve worked with, the smiles speak for themselves.”

Read the full case study.

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