Context: Prescriber-patient attachments (e.g., attending, consulting) can change when prescribers come on or off rotation, or take on-call responsibilities. Connect Care provides in-system tools for managing these changes. These are especially useful for short-term patient coverage changes, such as on-call or weekend assignments. The tools do not replace other systems (e.g., ROCA) used to manage call schedules.
There is no one way to express coverage responsibilities. It is essential that local groups forge a clear understanding about how prescribers will manage and reflect sign-overs within Connect Care.
Answer: A new Manual section and Tip describe and illustrate tools that facilitate quick changes to prescriber-patient attachments, either one-at-a-time or many-at-a-time. Examples of how these tools can be used include:
- Switch Attending Prescriber responsibility for an inpatient
- Need: Prescribers may shift a few patients after night-call in order to better balance patient loads or for a better fit of patient need to prescriber expertise.
- Action: Use Care Teams via Storyboard or Chart Search to take-over or reassign the attending prescriber.
- Switch Attending Prescriber responsibility for a group of inpatients
- Need: Prescribers often have assigned "rotations" with responsibility for an inpatient service or location for a defined period, after which all patients are signed over to the next attending.
- Action: Use Patient Lists (System Lists for patients grouped by a physical location or department, Provider Team Lists for patients assigned to a specific service, Personal Lists for patients manually grouped by a prescriber) to select multiple patients and reassign attending responsibility for all grouped patients at once.
- Designate a prescriber with inpatient on-call responsibilities for a defined period
- Need: A prescriber may take responsibility for a group of patients for an on-call or weekend period, without changing who is designated as the attending prescriber.
- Action: Using either Care Teams (one patient at a time) or Patient Lists (many patients at a time), add the covering prescriber as an "On Call Covering Physician", specifying a start and a stop time and any specifics about contacting that prescriber.
- Hand over responsibility for outpatient communications for a defined period
- Need: A prescriber may be away for a period, with arrangements for another prescriber to handle any outpatient-related communications during that period.
- Action: Temporarily assign the "out of office" prescriber's In Basket to the covering user(s) and/or message pool(s).