Efficiently managing staff assignments is essential for effective hospital operation and responsive patient care.

Staff assignments list the caregivers available for each shift and who is responsible for each bed location at a given escalation level. Hospital systems rely on accurate assignment data for everything from administration to critical patient care.

How many applications in your hospital depend on this information?  How is it accurately maintained across systems?  How many hours are wasted manually entering the same data into multiple systems?  Is out-of-date and inconsistent data across your systems the inevitable result?

Frustrating, isn’t it?

Common issues:

  • Wasted hours manually entering the same data into multiple systems, each with its own UI
  • Increased opportunities for data entry errors and inconsistencies
  • Delays until data is the same across all systems, if ever
  • Ad-hoc assignment updates can be inconvenient to make

It is a miracle that staff assignment data gets distributed properly, and let’s be honest, it probably doesn’t.

There must be a solution.

What if you could enter and update staff assignments in one system and have the data automatically flow to all your systems in real time?  And what if these changes could be made on the application most convenient at that moment, not the one and only master system at the other end of the facility?  Does it sound too good to be true?  It isn’t, and it’s real.

How do Staff Assignment API’s work?   Typically one system is designated the master system.  The majority of data entry/editing is done here.  This system provides a formal Staff Assignment API specification using industry standard technologies.  All other systems in the hospital implement this API to receive staff assignment updates in real time.

Use case #1:  Staff assignments for the following week are entered into the master system.  The new assignments are immediately published to all other subscribing systems in the hospital.

Use case #2:  Nurse ‘Nancy’ becomes unavailable for the rest of her shift.  Nurse ‘Bob’ is chosen to cover her assignments and all subscribing systems are immediately updated.

Use case #3:  Nurse ‘Nancy’ is going on break and Nurse ‘Laura’ agrees to cover.  Instead of wasting time going to the administrative station to update her assignments, she makes a few quick selections on her smart phone.  The phone app makes an API call to the master system to report the change, which is immediately published to all subscribing systems.

The Results

A system that uses a staff assignment API along with a smartphone application that automatically publishes the up to the minute assignments to every device can provide the following benefits:

  • Enter staff assignments in one system and they quickly and accurately propagate to all systems in the hospital.
  • No need to re-enter the same data in multiple applications.
  • Immediate and accurate data synchronization between systems.
  • Ability for assignment data to be updated by the application that makes sense for each use-case.

Staff Assignment API’s. What are you waiting for? Your staff and patients will thank you!