Using HL7 in hospital staff assignments

Abstract

Hospital staff assignments are the instructions that allocate the hospital staff members to the hospital beds. Currently, hospital administrators make the assignments without accessing the information regarding the occupancy of the hospital beds and the acuity of the patient. As a result, administrators cannot distinguish between occupied and unoccupied beds, and may therefore assign staff to unoccupied beds. This gives rise to uneven and inefficient staff assignments. In this paper, the hospital admission-discharge-transfer (ADT) system is employed both as a data source and an assignment device to create staff assignments. When the patient data is newly added or modified, the ADT system updates the assignment software client with the relevant data. Based on the relevant data, the assignment software client is able to construct staff assignments in a more efficient way. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.