From 2.5 Hours to 30 Minutes: How Valley Hospitalists Transformed Morning Patient Assignments with Medaptus

“It was kind of like them pulling cards.” That’s how Jackie Croft, Group Administrator at Valley Hospitalist Medical Group in Visalia, CA, described the daily scramble to assign patients before adopting Medaptus Assign, an automated patient assignment solution. 

Managing morning rounding assignments may not sound like a high-stakes operation—but for Jackie and her team of over 25 hospitalists at Kaweah Health Medical Center, it was a manual, time-draining, and sometimes chaotic process that had real implications for provider satisfaction and patient safety. 

The Challenge: Manual Mayhem in Morning Assignments 

Each morning, Jackie arrived at 5 a.m. to start matching more than 100 patients to available physicians. She’d gather face sheets from the night shift, track down which doctors were working, and manually negotiate assignments with each hospitalist. 

The result? A 2.5-hour daily ritual that wasn’t just inefficient—it risked mismatched acuity levels, overlooked provider preferences, and ultimately disrupted continuity of care. 

Worse yet, patients sometimes landed on the wrong census due to cross-coverage from another care group—taking hours to detect and correct. 

Jackie knew there had to be a better way.  

The Solution: Smarter, Faster Assignments with Medaptus 

Enter: Medaptus Assign. After evaluating it alongside a competitor, Jackie was skeptical at first. “We were all looking at each other thinking, it can’t be this easy,” she said. 

But it was. Assign’s four-step workflow automates the process:
1. Auto-populate the census directly from patient registration software.
2. Import the physician schedule from Valley’s scheduling platform.
3. Run the rules engine to auto-assign patients based on customizable logic (continuity, geography, acuity, etc.).
4. Review and finalize lists, which then sync directly to the EHR in real time. 

In short: no more early-morning chaos, no more card games. 

The Impact: 2 Hours Saved. Every Day. And Fewer Complaints 

Since implementing Assign, Valley has cut its assignment time from 2.5 hours to just 30 minutes. Even when exceptions come up—like last-minute changes or specific provider nuances—the system makes adjustments easy and quick. 

Jackie acknowledges that no system can handle every scenario perfectly. But with Assign’s flexible configuration, even the cases outside the norm are manageable—and far less disruptive than before. 

“There are numerous compounding factors specific to each hospital. Most are addressed by the rules built into Assign’s onboarding,” said Jackie. 

More Than Software: Partnership in Action 

Jackie also credits Medaptus’ support team—many of whom she’s worked with for nearly a decade—for consistently going above and beyond. Whether it’s 5 a.m. or 11 p.m., she knows she has a team that truly understands the demands of healthcare operations. 

Looking Ahead: Deeper Insights with the Assign Dashboard 

Medaptus is continuing to innovate with its new Hospitalist Medicine Analytics Dashboard—bringing visibility into how assignment decisions impact throughput, readmissions, and provider load balancing. 

Features like all-day assigning, automatic attending updates, and sign-out note functionality are already making waves. 

Final Thoughts: Is Assign Right for You? 

If your team is still relying on whiteboards, spreadsheets, or a daily card-pull, it might be time to rethink your approach. 

Because as Jackie and the team at Valley have learned: streamlining assignments isn’t just about saving time. It’s about improving safety, satisfaction, and sanity—for both patients and providers.