Health Unit Coordinator – Roles and Responsibilities

In bustling healthcare settings, where patients, doctors, and nurses are always on the move, maintaining order can feel like an uphill battle. The constant activity makes it challenging to stay organized and keep everyone in sync. Which is why it is essential for healthcare facilities to maintain a sense of coordination that enables them to seamlessly deliver quality patient care. That’s where the Health Unit Coordinator come in…

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

Health Unit Coordinators are vital to the success of a healthcare team’s care coordination.
They are responsible for ensuring seamless patient care through effective communication with healthcare professionals, patients, and families.
By following best practices, like investing in clinical communication and collaboration solutions and conducting training sessions, healthcare organizations can help Health Unit Coordinators free up their time and improve productivity.
Ultimately, Health Unit Coordinators provide support to all the moving parts of the unit they are responsible for and enable care teams to effortlessly provide quality patient care.

What is a Health Unit Coordinator?

Health Unit Coordinators are an integral part of a clinical team, playing a major role in a healthcare setting’s day-to-day operations and ensuring seamless patient experiences. They are the heart of their care team, serving complete administrative support to their hospital unit. And in their essence, they are the go-to point of contact for their unit, ensuring effective communication between all of its interconnected people and systems.

Health Unit Coordinator – Roles and Responsibilities

While all healthcare facilities vary in needs, the exact roles and responsibilities of a Health Unit Coordinator may differ, however some key roles and responsibilities include:

Scheduling

Whether it’s scheduling patient appointments, surgeries, or the care team’s on-call schedule, the Health Unit Coordinator does it all. They are tasked with managing schedules, so they must be organized to ensure that all requirements and preferences are met for optimal satisfaction of both their team and patients. With digital scheduling solutions, it’s easy for teams to create equitable on-call schedules, and they free up time for the Health Unit Coordinator, eliminating the need for them to continuously update and redistribute physical schedules.

Maintaining Patient Health Records

Health Unit Coordinators also have to maintain and update Patient Health Records ensuring that they reflect any of the necessary additions or changes to the patient’s information. Considering the weight of medical treatment, this task requires them to be detail-oriented, always making sure that they have correctly entered incoming patient details.

Communications

Communication is key to the role of the Health Unit Coordinator. They must notify doctors of incoming patients, upcoming operations, and consult requests, oftentimes through their clinical communication and collaboration systems to ensure that doctors have real-time access to new patient requests and information. They also have to communicate with patients, answering questions, providing updates to family members, and delivering reminders regarding their upcoming appointments.

Handling Requests

When a patient or doctor has a request, it is the job of the Health Unit Coordinator to ensure the request is fulfilled. In healthcare especially, it is vital that they’re able to stay calm and be sensitive to patient requests. Health Unit Coordinators handle all types of requests including patient admissions, patient discharge, room changes, dietary restrictions, emergencies, updating EHR records, etc.

Ensuring Doctors’ Orders are on the EHR

After a doctor enters an order in the EHR system, the Health Unit Coordinator validates that the order is accurate and visible on the patient’s record. They also must ensure that, if necessary, the EHR alerts are directed to the right recipients. Oftentimes the EHR system is integrated with an alerting tool that can route EHR alerts to the right care provider’s smartphone, allowing them the option to acknowledge the message. With solutions like this, the Health Unit Coordinator doesn’t need to manually call the doctor, wasting precious time. They can simply check their EHR for the acknowledgement and rest assured it was delivered.

Best Practices for Health Unit Coordinators

Health Unit Coordinators play a huge role in patient care and ultimately ensure that it is as seamless as possible for patients and care providers alike. So, it is vital that care teams prioritize these positions and provide them with the resources to effectively perform their duties. Below is a list of best practices for healthcare organizations to follow that will ensure success for Health Unit Coordinators:

Invest in Robust Clinical Communication and Collaboration Solutions

Employing a clinical communication and collaboration system that can simplify the delivery of critical messages will significantly improve your Health Unit Coordinator’s productivity. With these solutions, they can effortlessly deliver messages about patient admissions, emergencies, consult requests, etc. to the correct doctors without the need for referring to contact information or on-call schedules. They simply select the role, group, or individual they need to contact and the system will automatically route the message to the right person based on the on-call schedule.

Prioritize Interoperability in Healthcare Settings

Interoperability is essential across all disciplines in healthcare settings. However, it can be especially important for Health Unit Coordinators. By enabling seamless communication between existing health systems, Health Unit Coordinators can eliminate the need for manual processes, like calling doctors for a consultation after the request was added to the EHR. Through these integrations, once the request is put in, the doctor immediately gets the request sent to their phone – they don’t even need to log back into the EHR!

Conduct Sensitivity Training Sessions

When receiving medical treatment, patients and families are often anxious, leaving them to, justifiably, have unpredictable emotions and requests. Oftentimes, the Health Unit Coordinator is their go-to person and they have to be ready for any questions or requests that come their way. However, this can be emotional for them as well and when not properly trained, it can hinder the effectiveness of their communication and leave patients more worried than before. So, it is imperative for healthcare teams to conduct sensitivity sessions for their Health Unit Coordinators to prepare them for the sensitive conversations they may have with patients.

Clearly Define the Health Unit Coordinator’s Role

Considering the different needs of hospitals, disciplines, and units teams must clearly outline the role of their Health Unit Coordinator. Without a detailed description, Health Unit Coordinators may miss crucial tasks, through no fault of their own, as their previous positions may not have required them to perform that specific task. So, teams must examine their needs and establish a job description that will ensure that everyone is on the same page.

How OnPage Improves Care Coordination

Role-Based Messaging

With role-based messaging, Health Unit Coordinators can deliver alerts based on departments and on-call schedules. No more scrambling through paper schedules trying to decipher who the on-call doctor is at any given time or playing page-and-phone tag.

Digital Scheduling

OnPage has its own native scheduler that enables teams to create equitable, on-call schedules without the hassle. This allows teams to eliminate messy paper on-call schedules that frequently cause confusion and miscommunication. Plus, teams gain real-time visibility into schedule changes and updates right on their OnPage application.

Robust Integrations

Integrate OnPage with your existing health systems and enhance interoperability for your care teams. OnPage enables the seamless delivery of various health system alarms right to the right care team’s smartphone, every time. Centralizing these alerts ensures a quicker response to time-sensitive patient events.

FAQs

How can I communicate effectively as a Health Unit Coordinator?

With the help of a clinical communication and collaboration system, like OnPage, Health Unit Coordinators can seamlessly communicate with their care team to notify them about patient admissions, discharge, and EHR updates. These systems also provide audit trails and read receipts that allow Health Unit Coordinators to view when a message was read, so they can always rest assured that their message was received improving the effectiveness of their communication.

Do Health Unit Coordinators interact with patients?

Yes, Health Unit Coordinators are constantly interacting with patients. They are responsible for checking patients in and out, initiating transfers, answering questionsm and are essentially the unit’s go-to person for patient information.

How can I create the best on-call schedule for my care team?

Through the usage of digital on-call schedules, like OnPage, teams can optimize their on-call schedules and free up time for their Health Unit Coordinators. By eliminating paper schedules, there’s no more hassling with paper schedules and all care team members have real-time visibility into the most updated schedule. Now, Health Unit Coordinators don’t have to take up their time printing and distributing updated schedules.