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5. Assignment Manager Overview

Assignment Manager leverages the staffing data of Staff Manager and the patient data of Demand Manager and Outcomes-Driven Acuity (when available), to automate the assignment of caregivers to patients, personnel to departments, and communication devices to personnel. It also links assignments and devices in Staff Manager to CareAware AlertLink.

You can implement Assignment Manager progressively, receiving additional benefits at each stage.

• Level One: Assignment Manager with Patient, Relief, and Duty Assign to eliminate paper assignment sheets. Also included is Department Assign to assign staff to departments by shift.
• Level Two: Assignment Manager with Patient, Relief, Device, and Duty Assign with CareAware iBus. The iBus uses device services to pass available communication devices to Assignment Manager for assignment to personnel. In addition, iBus can be used in the Cerner Millennium environment, where assignments are sent from Assignment Manager in place of Shift Assign, Staff Assignment, or StaffLink to generate the Patient Activity List.

Assignment Manager facilitates workload assignments across caregivers while ensuring patient accountability throughout the shift and to support time-based assignment of any personnel to a department for efficient communication. Electronic storage of accurate assignment information supports accreditation and state regulatory compliance with assignment documentation and eliminates the need to store paper records.

Features of Assignment Manager

Assignment Manager includes the following features:

• Patient Assign
  • Assign for Continuity automatically assigns patients to the same caregivers in the same roles, starting with the caregivers who cared for the patients most recently.
  • Automatic calculation of number of patients, average acuity by caregiver, and percent assigned, providing real-time metrics to evaluate equitability.
  • Access to each caregiver’s competencies (IABP or chemotherapy certified) assists in assigning the appropriate caregiver to each patient.
• Relief Assign electronically tracks lunch and break coverage for each caregiver’s assigned patients.
• Duty Assign accounts for non-patient assignments, keeping an electronic record of caregiver time spent in non-patient related activities or responsibilities such as checking crash carts or counting medications.
• Department Assign supports assignment of any personnel to a department (for example, respiratory therapist covering ICU, nursing supervisor covering all departments, or chaplain on duty)
• Device Assign
  • Supports the assignment of communication devices to personnel. Requires CareAware iBus integration with Communication Device Services.
  • Includes primary and secondary alert designations by patient and automatically uses the department’s assigned charge nurse as tertiary.

In a Cerner Millennium Environment, Assignment Manager includes integration with the Cerner Millennium Staff Assign, Shift Assignment, and StaffLink tables

Assignment Manager works with Staff Manager or Standard Third-Party Staffing System Interface and Demand Manager. CareAware iBus version 2.0.3 or later is required for integration of assignment information.

Assignment Manager can operate in either a hosted or a local installation.

Best Practices for Using Assignment Manager

Assignment Manager can process assignments from many users at the same time; however, only one user should make assignments for a profile at a time. Multiple users entering the same assignments at the same time in the same profile may result in system error messages or the application dropping a user.

For example, assume Joe and Mary are both making assignments for the 6N MedSurg profile. Joe can assign caregivers to patients for the 6N MedSurg profile while Mary assigns devices to the 6N MedSurg staff. If Mary then tries to assign 6N MedSurg caregivers to patients while Joe is still making assignments, they both may see error messages or one of them may be dropped from the system.

Security Permissions and Employee Access to Assignment Manager Data

Managers use Staff Manager Client to set employee security permissions. You can either A) read Assignment Manager data only or B) read and edit Assignment Manager data. These permissions control access to the Assignment Manager data for all profiles and locations.

The following table lists the different features of Assignment Manager and how your security permissions affect them.

In addition to permission settings in Staff Manager Administrator and Staff Manager Client, Assignment Manager uses security information about each employee to determine which profiles and locations are available for that employee to select. Each employee automatically receives access to:

• All employee home profiles and associated locations. This means that employees with concurrent jobs are able to select and view patients in any profile considered one of their home profiles in Staff Manager.
• All profiles included in employees’ Floats To Profile menus.

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