Groups with Temporary Membership

When the membership of a group is dynamic, you may want to specify that it contains only temporary members.

For example, suppose a hospital uses a Code Blue group to respond to patient emergencies. Membership in this group changes with every shift, and membership also changes from day to day—that is, users who are in Code Blue on Monday are not necessarily members of the group on Tuesday.

Groups with such requirements can cause a maintenance problem, because users typically forget to remove themselves from the group at the end of their shifts. Temporary membership solves this problem, because Vocera automatically removes users from the group when they log out, while leaving them in the database. Users are not added into the group automatically when they log back in.

To minimize maintenance, you typically specify a separate group of users who can add themselves to the group with temporary membership. Users can then add themselves to the temporary group at the beginning of their shifts, and have Vocera remove them automatically at the end of the shift. For example, you can specify that members of the Nurses group can add themselves to the Code Blue group.

Check the Remove Users on Logout box on the Member page of the Add/Edit Group dialog box to specify that membership in the group is temporary. Use the Group of users permitted to add themselves to this group field on the Permissions page of the same dialog box to specify a group whose members can add themselves to the group with temporary members. See Adding or Editing a Group for complete information.

Note: Users are only removed from the group when they log out. Keep in mind that users may place badges in the charger or simply leave the site without logging out when their shifts end. To accommodate this behavior, consider enabling the following options: