Say goodbye to the manual patient assignment process
Northwell's South Shore University Hospital is an acute care hospital with an average census of 185 patients and 14 daily rounding providers. Formerly known as Southside Hospital.
Before the sun even comes up, Northwell South Shore University Hospital’s nocturnists are working away creating the daily rounding list. Amidst seeing patients themselves and ensuring anyone who got admitted was getting taken care of, their other core responsibilities included manually putting together the daily rounding list for the daytime hospitalists. But here’s the thing: there’s only so much that a pen and paper, or an Excel spreadsheet, can do. Creating the rounding list like this wasn’t so simple. Two of South Shore University Hospital’s doctors, who oversee this, Dr. Sharma and Dr. Rosenthal, had to deal with a lot of issues:
- A physician called in sick and the rounding list needed to be manually updated to reassign his/her patients
- The volume of patients coming in increased, as did the number of rounders and admitters, making the
manual process unsustainable - Nocturnists had to rush between seeing patients themselves and going back to their list-making duties
- Providers complained about having to round on patients in multiple buildings
- It was hard to keep track of where patients were especially as the week went on and patients were moving
between departments
“As our census grew and the number of rounders and admitters grew, we outgrew our processes
of manually assigning patients in the morning. We knew we had to get something that would help
us in terms of efficiency and patient safety,” said Dr. Rosenthal, who is the lead nocturnist at
Northwell.
What It Looks Like Now
Not only was the manual process taking up way too much of their time, Dr. Rosenthal and his team knew that looking into alternate ways to do rounding lists would help with key issues like patient safety and provider satisfaction. “You help us ensure continuity of care and that the right people get assigned to the right patients,” said Dr. Sharma, another nocturnist at Northwell. “When you’re jumping from provider to provider, you may hurt the patient care that’s provided.”
They implemented medaptus’ Assign software, which automates the patient rounding/distribution list process to ultimately improve continuity of care and patient safety; improve physician workload and reduce burnout, and help hospitals get real-time insights that help them improve the care they deliver. The end result?
“With our old manual way, we had to type out all the admissions, figure out which provider was going to be going with which patient, based on what the end of day census was and if there were any secondary needs to consider (such as the patient needing to be discharged that day, or a family issue, or if they needed to stay with a certain provider),” said Dr. Rosenthal.
“After all the patients were assigned, that would get emailed to our logistics person who would make manual changes, then get that information in our EMR. But there’s also a time lag when the email is sent and the patients are updated in the system, so nurses would have to call the doctors and try to figure out who needed to be seen by who.”
“You help us ensure continuity of care and that the right people get assigned to the right patients,” said Dr. Sharma, another nocturnist at Northwell.
Now, Assign automates all that – making it happen faster, more efficiently, and allowing them to preserve considerations that they could never do manually, such as preserving continuity of care and geography.
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To view the full case study on Northwell’s success with Assign, please fill out the form below for a downloadable PDF.
