Clinical placement software decides where each nursing or medical student trains in a hospital, on which ward and for how long, and it records the hours and sign-offs that each student needs to graduate. A placement is one period of supervised training in a hospital or clinic. It is also called a clinical rotation, and in India a clinical posting. The software is sold mainly to nursing, medical and other health-science colleges in the United States, so the example here is American.
Why is this hard? A nursing college does not own the hospitals in which its students train. It must agree with each hospital how many students that hospital will take, on which wards, on which days, and under which supervising nurse. A supervising nurse can guide only a few students at a time. And several colleges in the same city often ask the same hospitals for the same wards.
Consider a nursing school in Ohio with 240 students in its second year. This semester, each student needs 90 hours on a medical-surgical ward, the ward for adults who are recovering from an illness or an operation. Four partner hospitals have offered 62 places in all, in shifts of 12 hours. The software matches students to places. It makes sure that no student returns to a hospital where she has already trained, and it considers how far each student lives from each hospital.
Before a student starts, the hospital needs proof of certain documents. These include vaccination records, a criminal background check and a certificate in basic life support. The software stores each document with its expiry date. It blocks a placement if a document will expire before the placement ends, and it reminds the student a month in advance.
During the placement, the student logs each shift in the app: the date, the hours and the procedures she took part in. Say she logs a 12-hour shift on a Tuesday. Her supervising nurse approves the entry on her phone. The software adds it to the student's total, which is now 48 of 90 hours. At the end, the nurse fills in an evaluation form, and the college's teachers review it. The theory part of the same course runs in the college's learning management system (LMS).
The software reads the list of students and their courses from the college's student information system (SIS). The approved hours count towards each student's grade. The college also shows these records to the body that checks its programmes. A nursing degree counts only when an institution with accreditation awards it, and the accrediting body checks that students really completed their clinical hours.
Indian nursing colleges must also arrange clinical postings, with hours set by the Indian Nursing Council. Many of them have an attached hospital of their own, and plan the postings on spreadsheets. On the ward, students also learn to write notes in the hospital's electronic health records (EHR).