Bed Assignment
Bed assignments involve placing patients in appropriate hospital beds based on their medical needs and bed availability. The Patient Placement team is responsible for making these assignments. Assignments are made after receiving a bed request from an area like the Emergency Department or Procedural Unit, but only once the patient is marked as Ready to Move (RTM). This process is essential to ensure patients receive the right care at the right time, minimize wait times, prevent bottlenecks, and avoid errors like double assignments or unnecessary internal transfers. The TeleTracking system helps streamline this by providing real-time bed status updates and patient information, ensuring efficient, accurate placements.
Bed assignments are made from the Patient/Placement Details form Capacity IQ® PreAdmit or Patient Tracking Portal.
How Bed Assignments Work
Functionality
Patient Placement, involving targeting units and assigning beds to patients, is vital to hospital operations. Within TeleTracking's application, you have the ability to quickly and easily see bed status updates.
When an area requests a patient bed, you are able to see important request information such as bed and patient attributes, allowing you to place the patient in the right bed to receive the right care.
A key piece of your workflow is around timely bed assignments.
Once you receive a bed request you are able to target the unit where you want to send the patient.
This serves as communication to let the requesting and receiving unit know the patient will be going to that unit.
Only when the requesting unit activates the Ready to Move (RTM) will you assign a bed to the patient.
This workflow helps you avoid seeing instances such as two beds assigned to one patient, longer wait times for patients, an increase in the need for internal transfers due to inappropriate first-time bed placements.
When you can assign the right patient to the right bed, at the right time, you help patients get to the care they need when they are ready to receive it. This leads to better outcomes for patients.
Bed Assignment Flow:
Once the ED or Procedural area has marked the patient as Ready to Move Patient Placement will receive an Alert in the application and will now need to take action to place the patient into a bed in the targeted unit.
From the moment that Patient Placement receives the initial Bed Request, planning for providing an assignment was initiated.
Remember that Patient Placement has already targeted a unit based on patient needs and bed availability.
Once the unit was targeted, the Receiving Unit could see the patient details and could then plan for which bed they want Patient Placement to assign.
The Receiving Unit does this by identifying the Bed Assignment Priorities.
Bed Assignment Priorities are a way for Nursing Units to communicate the order they want Patient Placement to assign their beds.
Therefore, when it is time to Assign a Bed, Patient Placement will look for the priorities set on the unit to guide them in their decision.
If no priorities are selected, best judgment based on the patient's needs and current bed availability will be used to assign a bed.
Once a bed is assigned, the timestamp will be documented in the Assd @ field.
An Assigned bed is the bed to which a patient has been assigned.
If you have the Access Bed Info permission, you may click the bed identifier to view bed details.
If this cell is blank in a patient row, then the patient does not have an open placement.
The background color of the bed identifier represents the bed's status (such as light green for Clean, dark green for Suspended, orange for Occupied, brown for Dirty, silver for Clean Next, red for Stat, yellow for In Progress, black for Blocked, and light and dark blue for UDEF-8 and UDEF-9).
If Multi-Stage Cleans is enabled in the BedTracking Global Settings page, the bed identifier for In Progress beds appears on a yellow background followed by a number one in a light blue circle for the first stage cleaning and a number two in a dark blue circle for the second stage cleaning.
If the bed is in an unclean status and there is a delayed bed cleaning job associated with it, then the bed identifier appears on a tan background.
In this case, you can move your mouse over the bed identifier to display a tooltip showing the unclean status of the bed, such as Clean Next or Stat, and the reason that the bed cleaning job was delayed (such as Patient Still in Room).
If a bed is not assigned within a pre-determined amount of time set on the Capacity Management Administration page, then the Assignment Timer background color changes from green to yellow.
If the background color changes to yellow and then another pre-determined amount of time passes without a bed assignment, the background color changes to red.
If this cell is blank in a patient row, then the patient does not have an open placement.
You can mark beds with numbers from 1 through 9 from the electronic bedboard® view or a list view.
This is called setting a bed assignment priority.
The bed will be assigned based on the facility's definition of the priority.
There is no limit on the number of beds that can be assigned each priority.
When the bed is assigned or occupied, the priority number will be removed.
Setting a bed assignment priority is sometimes called "bed ahead."
You may set assignment priorities only for beds in units that have the Allow Bed Assignment Priority setting enabled.
This setting can be enabled from the Capacity Management Administration page.
You must have the Set/Clear Bed Assignment Priority permission to complete this task.
After a bed assignment has been made, it can be removed if you have the Remove Bed Assignment permission.
When the Maintain Bed Assignment on Pending / Confirmed Discharge Status global setting is disabled, then when a patient's status becomes Pending Discharge or Confirmed Discharge, the patient's targeted unit and bed assignment are removed.
However, short-term-stay patients frequently still are being moved from one location to another when their patient status becomes Pending Discharge or Confirmed Discharge.
Often, they still need their targeted units and assigned beds.
You can prevent a patient's targeted unit and bed assignment from being removed when they are in Pending or Confirmed Discharge status by enabling the Maintain Bed Assignment on Pending / Confirmed Discharge Status setting.
Assign a Bed
Click on a Patient’s name from the list view or click New PreAdmit to open the Patient/Placement Details form.
Note: PreAdmitting should be done throught your ADT system. Manual PreAdmits should only be added if your ADT system is down.
Enter the Patient’s First and Last Name if it’s a New PreAdmit.
Select a Target Unit in the Placement Information section.
Click on the Adv. Search button to open the Advanced Bed Search.
Select an available bed from the list of results and click on the bed identifier.
The bed identifier will appear in the Assigned Bed field in the Placement Information section of the Patient/Placement Details.
Click Save.
A warning message appears if another patient with the same last name 1) is already in a home, current, or specialty location on the assigned or targeted unit, 2) has an assigned bed on the unit, 3) has been targeted to have a bed on the unit, or 4) has a transport job that starts or ends in the unit. If your hospital's policy is to prevent admitting multiple patients with the same last name to the same unit (for example, to avoid confusion when medications are distributed), then you might want to select a different unit.
Remove a Selected Assigned Bed from Patient/Placement Details
Open the Patient/Placement Details form.
In the Assigned Bed field on the Patient/Placement Details window, select the bed identifier.
Press the Delete key on your keyboard.
Set or Remove a Bed Assignment Priority
Access the electronic bedboard and configure it.
In a list view in the Bed column, click the bed identifier, and then on the menu that appears, click Bed Assignment Priority # (Bed Assignment Priority 1 through 9) or click Remove Bed Assignment Priority. On the electronic bedboard, press and hold the Shift key, click the bed identifier for the bed, and then on the menu that appears, click Bed Assignment Priority # (Bed Assignment Priority 1 through 9) or click Remove Bed Assignment Priority.
Allow Bed Assignment Priority Setting
If you are unable to enable the Allow bed assignment priority Capacity IQ® PreAdmit Unit setting, follow these steps.
To enable Allow bed assignment priority in unit settings, you must first enable the setting Allow as target unit.
Go to Units
After selecting the unit, click Unit PreAdmitTracking Settings and notice both settings are set to No.
After enabling Allow as target unit to Yes, it is now possible to set Allow bed assignment priority to Yes.
Save to keep these changes.
Maintain Patient Targeted Unit and Bed Assignment When Patient Status is Pending or Confirmed Discharge
Access the PreAdmitTracking® Global Settings page.
In the General Information section, click the Disabled button for Maintain bed assignment on Pending / Confirmed Discharge status to change it to a green Enabled button.