Integrating QGenda with Vocera Platform

Multiple Vocera Platform components, including the Vocera QGenda Adapter, are utilized in a QGenda system integration.

QGenda is a scheduling application used for, among other things, scheduling on-call physicians for hospitals. This document describes how to use Vocera QGenda Adapter, along with other Vocera Platform components, to allow hospital staff to contact the on-call provider for a particular specialty from the various Vocera endpoints, especially Vocera Vina, Vocera Collaboration Suite, and the Vocera badges.

Key Points

The Vocera QGenda Adapter is used to create assignments on the Vocera Platform for specific roles, locations, and users. These assignments depend on Assignment Manager to determine their current state, based on the assignment start and end times.

Users are mapped from the Staff External Call System ID, obtained from the QGenda system.

Role and Location are determined by the adapter configuration's Task Mapping using the Task External Call System ID, obtained from the QGenda system. At a minimum, the key values for the role and location links on the assignment must be specified, however, other fields on those datasets can also be specified, if useful.

In order to map assignments to groups and contact the users via Vocera Badge or the VCS application, the Vocera Voice Group Sync Adapter has to be used.

Process Overview

The basic intent is that each specialty within an organization will have a single Group representing the currently on-call specialist(s). These groups will then be part of the Mobile roster to allow contact to the specialists via Vocera Vina. For VCS and the Vocera Badges, these groups will also be synchronized with Voice Server groups, which enables users to contact the specialist via the app/device.

The Vocera QGenda Adapter translates each schedule entry in the QGenda schedule into a (potentially future) Assignment in Vocera Platform. Vocera Assignment Manager Adapter is then used to mark those assignments as active (current) and expired. Vocera Assignment Group Sync Adapter is used to then synchronize the active assignments with a Group based on the assignment role and location. If needed for VCS or Badge integration, the Vocera Voice Group Sync Adapter is used to synchronize those groups with Voice Server groups.

The configuration for these components are similar to those used for assignment systems that report future assignments and specify an assignment start and end date. The Vocera QGenda Adapter is considered an "External Staff Assignment System" as described in Understanding Voice Group Sync .

QGenda Overview

Typically, a hospital environment will have multiple QGenda schedules, each controlled by a different physicians group or similar organization, under the hospital's umbrella QGenda environment. Schedule data is entered using the QGenda cloud service, generally by someone on the physicians group administrative staff. The Vocera QGenda Adapter retrieves schedule information from this web application via a REST API.

Within a single schedule there are two primary abstractions:
  • Staff, representing a single physician or similar specialist. They are identified by the "External Call System ID" in QGenda. This value is mapped to the User's login attribute in Vocera Platform. QGenda will also allow other information about the user to be saved, such as their name and contact information.
  • Task, representing scheduling time slots for a particular activity to which a staff member will be assigned. They are identified by the "External Call System ID" in QGenda. They also specify a start and end time, which applies to all users assigned to that shift. There is also an ability to specify the number of staff members that should be assigned to a shift at a time.

For example, in a Cardiologist physicians group, the Staff abstraction would represent the physicians as members in the group, while the Task abstraction might represent shifts for the Daytime On-Call, Evening On-Call, and Overnight On-Call physician(s).

Integration Considerations

It is imperative that the External Call System IDs for Staff and Tasks are properly set in QGenda. Any Staff or Task that does not have an External Call System ID set will be ignored.

For Staff, the External Call System ID must match the Vocera Platform login of a user.

For Task, the External Call System ID should be formatted so the Task Mappings in the Vocera QGenda Adapter configuration can be used to set the Role and Location for the Assignment.