Still Seeing Patient Assignment Process Problems Since Your Epic Implementation?

Your healthcare organization has bought and implemented EPIC’s EHR solution – Now what?

A healthcare organization can expect to cover the upfront cost of an EHR in approximately 2.5 years, according to a Health Affairs study. Until then, you may not be seeing any net profit and you certainly may not have the budget for any ancillary (new) software solutions.

Let’s fast forward 3 years…Your organization is stable, gone through the typical speedbumps of a full EHR EPIC implementation and your IT staff can exhale. It’s time to pull back the curtain and see what areas of your hospital still need to be streamlined or, in some cases, have not improved at all.

Why Does Epic Implementation Still Leave Patient Assignment Problems Unsolved?

What Is the Hospitalist Team Still Doing Manually After Epic Go-Live?

One gap that we have consistently heard in the field is the lack of any streamlined or intelligent patient assignment solution for your Hospitalist team.  This is often an overlooked and underfunded group within most hospital organizations, yet this group is responsible for a crucial part of your organization’s goal: Patient Throughput – Getting the patient admitted and discharged in a timely manner.

What is the hospitalist team doing now? 

• Manually building treatment teams each morning
• Dragging and dropping patients to certain lists
• Doctors updating themselves as part of the care/treatment team
• Making sure all your ICU, ER & Downgrade patients are accounted for
• Verifying overnight admits with the nocturnist staff

Do these EPIC screenshots look familiar?

EPIC Screenshots

What Problems Result from Manual Patient Assignment After an Epic Implementation?

Performing all these manual steps typically leads to non-optimal assignment lists for your hospitalist team in the morning. The result? 

• Hospitalists getting unfair workloads, leading to burnout and frustrations
• Impact to patient care, due to lack of continuity of care
• Hospitalists running around to see patients on different floors or units
• Lots of miscommunications as nurses and staff have to manually call, text, email, or fax updated patient lists and confirm who needs to be seen by which hospitalist
• Staff spending hours creating rounding lists every day

That’s why our Assign solution automates the patient assignment process to solve these challenges, and more. And since it’s integrated with EPIC, you save time and improve efficiencies.

Table 1: Manual Epic Patient Assignment vs. medaptus Assign Automation 

How Does medaptus Assign Complement Your Epic EHR?

Let’s look at what Medaptus Assign can do for your EPIC Hospital.

Automatically populate your “Hospitalists specific” census using EPIC data

The Hospitalist census is typically a revolving door with many moving parts:

• Patients transferring from the ED
• ICU downgrades
• Overnight admits
• Consults

Most organizations have trouble managing all these moving parts. How often do you see a delay in patient care due to a registration issue?

With medaptus’ census, you can fully control the patients your team is rounding on in real-time. Using data from an EPIC interface feed and our management tools, we put you in control of what patients are being rounded on.

Automatically interface assignments back into EPIC

Your Medaptus Assignment lists are complete (read more about our automated patient assignment software).

The downstream communication of these assignments is a crucial step and is often overlooked. Providers needing to manually update themselves as attending or manually populating their own treatment team is a daily burden that takes away from patient care. With medaptus’ “Assignment interface technology,” we can automatically update Patient -> Provider relationships for your morning assignments and for patients throughout the day.

Medaptus works with each client on their individual needs:

• The patient’s care team is automatically updated to the current attending
• Medaptus can place the patients on the proper treatment team…no more manually dragging and dropping patients.

Having timely care team updates has a positive downstream impact throughout your hospital:

• Nurses will know who to contact immediately when they start their shift
• APP/Mid Levels will know which patients they are rounding on based on supervising Attending
• Sub Specialty Units will know who which attending to contract for an update on patient care

Conclusion

The medaptus Assign solution can help fill workflow gaps while working cohesively with EPIC EHR. We like to consider our software an ally to your current workflow, not a competition. 

Ready to start thinking about how to improve your patient assignment process with EPIC and Medaptus? Check out how much it could impact your hospital here.

FAQs

Why Doesn’t Epic Solve Patient Assignment on Its Own? 

Epic is a comprehensive EHR but was not built for the dynamic complexity of daily hospitalist patient assignment. It lacks rules-based assignment logic, workload balancing, geographic optimization, and automated downstream communication of assignments. medaptus Assign is purpose-built to handle these workflows and integrates directly with Epic. 

How Long After Epic Go-Live Can We Implement medaptus Assign? 

Assign can be implemented at any point — whether immediately after Epic go-live or years later. The integration uses standard HL7 interfaces already available in Epic. Most implementations take approximately three months from contract signing to go-live. 

What Happens to Nurse and APP Workflows When Assignments Change During the Day? 

With medaptus Assign, any intraday assignment change is automatically pushed back to Epic via HL7 message. Nurses and APPs see the updated care team in Epic immediately — without anyone needing to manually notify them. This eliminates the most common source of miscommunication on the floor. 

How Much Time Do Hospitalists Typically Save with Assign? 

Instead of spending 1–3 hours creating daily rounding lists manually, the process gets done in minutes. Across a full hospitalist team, this represents significant daily labor savings — time that can be redirected to patient care.