3 Interesting Things We Learned from our Customers at Ignite, Medaptus’ First Customer Advisory Board Meeting

Last week, we launched Ignite: Medaptus’ Hospital Medicine Customer Advisory Board (CAB) where we brought together a select group of medaptus Assign customers to share best practices and use cases with their peers, provide feedback on new Assign features and enhancements, and influence the development of product roadmap priorities.

I’m grateful to the customers who joined our first meeting and took time out of their day to share their feedback with us. Our members span a variety of hospitals across the US, with different amounts of patient census, different numbers of providers, and different EHRs. Here’s a look at the members of the CAB who use medaptus Assign to streamline their patient assignment process:

In this first session, we introduced the purpose of the CAB and what the members could expect in the coming months.

They were also the first to get a sneak peek of the new hospitalist executive dashboards which will allow hospital medicine leaders to see a full picture of how their department is performing in real-time (including reports on admissions per hour, readmits per 30 days, provider productivity, census rates). The feedback was very positive, and our customers are excited to use this data to understand historical trends and to make prediction staffing models.

Here are 3 interesting things that the CAB members highlighted in the first meeting:

1. It’s not just about assigning patients to the right providers in the morning – but making sure patients are assigned correctly throughout the entire day and the entire care team knows who to go to if they have a question about that patient.

As one customer said, “It has been a lifesaver for us. It used to be a very manual process for us in the beginning. We adopted Census Manager (which automatically assigns patients throughout the day), which has been a life-changing piece for us.

If you had seen the way we processed assignments before, I look back and say I don’t know how we did it. It was all manual, we were looking for a program for some time, and medaptus was the best fit for us.”

2. No more spending time manually updating provider names in registration. One of our customers recently implemented an HL7 feed to interface data from registration to medaptus.

“We have an HL7 feed that updates the provider’s name in our system and that has been a lifesaver. It used to take my office team about 5 patient associates on a Wednesday all eight hours was dedicated to updating patient names to the right attending and now it’s done within 10 minutes.”

3. Things are constantly changing, especially as hospitals grow and census increases. Having a system where you can update the rules that matter most to you, makes it much easier to deal with these changes (for example, to have the system automatically assign patients based on geography).

“We used to have a rudimentary system in Excel where we would try to track patients. We would lose patients all the time, they would change floors and we couldn’t keep track of geography and assignments. We’ve been using Assign for a couple years now and we’re really happy just running the program in the morning and being able to update our rules about how our patients are weighted and that new patients are weighted differently than patients you’ve seen before. It makes it more transparent for the docs to see how patients are distributed and enables us to allow for both continuity and geography for the best we can accomplish.”

We’re grateful to our customers for joining the first Hospital Medicine CAB meeting and look forward to learning more about their challenges and how we can support them in future meetings.