Sign out sheet

[Slevin]

I am wondering if anyone uses excel to manage their list of hospitalized patients for their inpatient team. We use word and I’m looking for something better to use

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[Raryn]

I am wondering if anyone uses excel to manage their list of hospitalized patients for their inpatient team. We use word and I’m looking for something better to use

Sure, lots of services do. Several of my rotations in medical school I was tasked with updating the excel sheet.

Does your EMR not let you make sign out sheets? That's what most people eventually switched to.

 

[mvenus929]

We have a consult only service, so we use an excel sheet because the sign out system for the inpatients is intended for the primary team, and we don’t necessarily care about everything related to the patient, just what pertains to our specialty.

The hard part is figuring out where to store it that it can be easily accessed and updated, and is still HiPAA complaint. If you’re only storing it on the hospital servers and not accessing from home, not a big deal.

And probably much easier to organize and edit than a word document.

 

[TraumaLlamaMD]

We have a shared drive on the hospital system network where we store our Excel sheet. I guess it’s probably better than Word, but I wouldn’t call it “good” by any stretch.

 

[raisinbrain]

We have a consult only service, so we use an excel sheet because the sign out system for the inpatients is intended for the primary team, and we don’t necessarily care about everything related to the patient, just what pertains to our specialty.

The hard part is figuring out where to store it that it can be easily accessed and updated, and is still HiPAA complaint. If you’re only storing it on the hospital servers and not accessing from home, not a big deal.

And probably much easier to organize and edit than a word document.

Not sure what EMR you’re on, but Epic also can have Many different sign off / handoff sections, separate for different specialties (but all viewed in the same way). So your consult team would just all change theirs to view only the consult one. We used that for Surg/Med comanaged patients quite well. Other EMRs may have something similar.

I was never a fan of the excel based hand offs - can’t access from home, can’t have multiple people with the document open, what happens when it gets duplicated, etc.

 

[mvenus929]

Not sure what EMR you’re on, but Epic also can have Many different sign off / handoff sections, separate for different specialties (but all viewed in the same way). So your consult team would just all change theirs to view only the consult one. We used that for Surg/Med comanaged patients quite well. Other EMRs may have something similar.

I was never a fan of the excel based hand offs - can’t access from home, can’t have multiple people with the document open, what happens when it gets duplicated, etc.

Yeah, we don't have Epic. I'm very familiar with the multiple sign-outs available in Epic (I attempted to get our institution to use them in residency, but got pushback from the residency administration), but our EMR doesn't have even the sign-out capability I had at my last institution with the same EMR, and that was only one sign-out available per patient (so the consultants wouldn't be able to have a separate sign-out sheet, but could have a list with their consult patients on it).

We also have Office 365 at our institution, so we have the Excel file in a secured OneDrive that is shared amongst the people in our department. Multiple people can edit it at the same time, and it exists in the context of Teams/Sharepoint, so if it gets duplicated by accident, everyone has access to the duplicated document as well. It works well for our purposes.

 

[Keona]

Listrunner is amazing!!

 

[Slevin]

Listrunner is amazing!!

I just took a look at list runner. It looks amazing. How long did it take to get off the wait list?

 

[Slevin]

Also is there a way anyone can share their blank excel template?

We have MS access and the person who started it has long since left and no one here knows how to alter it to update it for changing times. So we are stuck using a template from 2010. Ugh

 

[Keona]

I just took a look at list runner. It looks amazing. How long did it take to get off the wait list?

I don’t remember. We were one of the early adopters when they were sort of beta testing it. I think a month or so. It’s been a while though.

 

[NotAProgDirector]

There are a bunch of apps like this out there. WardManager is another: WardManager

 

[ortnakas]

We use Excel.

 

[FlowRate]

We have a consult only service, so we use an excel sheet because the sign out system for the inpatients is intended for the primary team, and we don’t necessarily care about everything related to the patient, just what pertains to our specialty.

The hard part is figuring out where to store it that it can be easily accessed and updated, and is still HiPAA complaint. If you’re only storing it on the hospital servers and not accessing from home, not a big deal.

And probably much easier to organize and edit than a word document.

I keep a Word doc of my patients for the simple reason that the default behavior of word tables when you press enter is new line, which helps with formatting med lists/diagnosis lists. (In excel it enters the value and moves to the next cell.) If you put the view in Web mode it's not very different from an excel table, otherwise.

 

[Planes2Doc]

We use templates in Word, which are saved on the shared server. It really sucks when you go to another part of the hospital and can't edit the document because you left it open on another computer. Something like Google Docs is ideal because multiple people can edit it simultaneously and from anywhere, but I'm guessing it's not very HIPAA-compliant.