Staff Assignment Solution

The Staff Assignment solution synchronizes the list of staff members assigned to roles or patients in a third-party system with the assignments in the Vocera Platform database.

Either system (Vocera or third party external vendor) can serve as the source of truth. Vocera can aggregate assignments from multiple systems, including Vocera, and visually display all assignments for each unit/department. If the source of truth for the assignment is something other than Vocera, then Vocera will display the assignment with a lock and users will not update those assignments from within Vocera.

In some situations you may use a third-party system (such as Epic Systems, an EHR provider) as the source of truth for some assignments, a nurse call system (such as Hillrom) for other assignments, and Vocera for additional assignments. Vocera will manage all cumulative assignments to populate Vocera Groups in order to message, broadcast, send alerts to, or to call by role. The Vocera Platform should aggregate the correct team members so that individuals can use voice commands to call by role, particularly important when they do not know who is filling the role at a given time.

In your facility, the providers and nursing staff may make assignments to patients in Epic, which is used for charting as well as scheduling. Charge Nurses and Patient Care Techs may make assignments in the nurse call system to facilitate communication. Ancillary services that cover units, such as Respiratory Therapy and Pharmacy, may use Vocera to make assignments to the unit. Roles like House Supervisor can also be set in Vocera. Collectively, all of these assignments, whether at the patient level, room level, unit level or facility level, can be visualized in Vocera for one comprehensive view. These assignments may then be utilized to:

Call 3W Charge Nurse
Send Panic Alert to all Unit Staff and House Supervisor
Broadcast to 6 North Staff
Send Rapid Response Alert to Rapid Response Team
Send a Message from Pharmacy to Room 301 Nurse

Using the ROL Segment in the ADT-A08 Message

Staff assignment leverages the ROL segment of an HL7 ADT-A08 message. The ADT-A08 trigger event is used when any patient information has changed and can include information specific to an episode of care.

For instance, an A08 event can be used to notify the receiving systems of a change of address or a name change. The staff assignment system creates an update event in the EHR for the Charge Nurse role (ROL|1) when the staff "mpaschal" is scheduled for that role and unit in the system. The information included in the HL7 message includes an admit update segment (ADT^A08) as well as patient identification (PID) and visit information (PV1).

This HL7 sample can be configured to trigger (send a notification) immediately on a related assignment change in Vocera.

MSH|^~\&|VOCERA^VOCERA^GUID||||20200206141230||
ADT^A08|9a6f1dce-2a89-4a00-ae22-18828e7721f5|P|2.3
PID|||00112233445||Smith^Joan||19640710|M
PV1|||UNIT^1^1||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||FACILITY
ROL|1||Charge Nurse|^^^^^^^^^^^^mpaschal2|20200206141155