The monitoring system contains a shift management system that works with the care teams and monitor plans to decide who should receive routed work during a specific date and time.
When a patient is set up, one or more care teams may be assigned to monitor a patient. A care team is a named collection of people who play roles in providing services to a patient.
In the following screen shot, a care team named “Primary Care Team” has been created. This primary care team has a list of assigned individuals playing a role in the care of the patient. Note that each assigned individual has shift associated with their work on the care team.
Specifically, notice the shift assigned to Robert Jones. Robersons has been assigned the shift named 8-5 M-F. The name implies that Robert will only be available to the care team to play the role of doctor for patients assigned to the care team during 8:00 to 5:00 Monday thru Friday.
Shifts are defined in the monitor by way of the Shifts List tool. Clicking on the icon or link for the shifts list presents the shifts that have been defined for the department. Using the Shifts list, you can review those defined shifts and you can create a new shift by clicking on the New button to the top right of the display.
In the shift list shown here, we can see the shift named 8-F M-F that was assigned to Robert in the above care team example. If we click on the 8-5 M-F link in the shift list, we can see how the shift was defined to the system. The following screen clip shows the 8-5 M-F shift
The name of the shift is 8-5 M-F. You can name a shift anything that you want but you are better off if you name the shift something that corresponds to the rules of the shift.
The Available Days for this shift have been set to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The start and stop times correspond to the hours to be worked, and in this example have been set to 8-5pm.
The M-F 8-5 shift is set up to run without exclusions per these rules. No work will be assigned to Robert in days and times that do not correspond to the shift rules.
But what about things like holidays? If we leave the shift as is, then Robert will end up working on holidays. Perhaps this is ok, but if not, the plus sign icon next to the Blocked Days can be used to exclude specific days from the shift.
Once you have created a shift, you can use that shift in setting up your care team. The assignment section of the care team has a drop down on it that allows you to pick from the shifts you’ve defined and assign that shift to that individual.
Availability
In some cases, a shift may not accurately reflect the availability of an individual. For example, what happens if Robert is sick? The availability drop down lets you override the shift assignment. If the availability drop down is set to Per Shift, then the rules of the shift are used to determine whether Robert is available.
If Robert were on vacation, or out sick, simply setting Robert to Not Available in the availability drop down would make it so that work would not be assigned to Robert on the days that he is unavailable. When Robert returns to work, changing his availability back to Per Shift places Robert back “on schedule”.
If Robert were to come in on times outside of his shift, he could mark himself as Available in the availability drop down. This setting overrides the shift and says basically “I know I am on this shift, but right now I’m available”. It’s a good setting to use in the event of an emergency when you don’t want to change shifts but just need all hands on deck.
There are buttons next to the availability section of the care team member list that allow you to quickly make everyone available or unavailable.
Hidden Care Team Members
In some cases, you may not want the patients to see who is assigned to their care team. For example, you may want to route work to an IT help desk, but not provide that person’s name to the patient. The “Hidden” attribute on the care team assignment dictates whether or not the assigned member is visible to the patient. The patient applets that show care team member assignments pays attention to the hidden attribute when showing a patient who is on call at a particular time.
Regions and Locations
Shifts may be different per region or location. You can set up a shift to only be available to a specific region or location by using the Shift Region and Location drop down settings. If you do so, than that shift will only be available to the folks that work in that region and or location.
You can see shifts specific to a region by using the Shift List and selecting the region or location of interest.