What Clinical Placement Professionals Can Learn From Three Nursing Program Stories

Hey, everyone, and welcome. We're so glad that you could join us today for what clinical coordinators can learn from three nursing program stories. Before we just jump in, I just want to give a couple quick housekeeping notes. If you have questions at any point during the session, please drop them into the Q&A tab. Since it's just me presenting today, I'll do my best to answer questions as I go along. So like I said, feel free to drop them in. And then, otherwise, we'll have a point at the end where we can get to any questions that we weren't able to along the way. We'll also send out the webinar recording and the slides within the next couple of days, so don't worry if you miss anything or if you wanna revisit anything later on. With that, let's get started. So my name is Kaylee Larson. I'm a Client Success Manager here with our CORE products at PeopleGrove. Prior to starting this role, I had spent twelve years in higher education where I'd most recently worked as a clinical education manager for a school of nursing. In that role, I happen to manage an accelerated BSN program as well as several NP tracks. So having been on your side of the table, I understand that clinical planning can be complex and sometimes challenging. One of my favorite things about working with nursing schools is helping them to transition to a system that allows them to streamline the process, which I know can be messy sometimes. And I'm excited to be here with you guys today and to share some of the stories from clients that I work directly with. Each program had a different challenge, but I think you'll notice some of the common themes around what made those challenges easier to manage. So program growth always brings new opportunities. I think all of us can probably side with that, but we also know that it brings complexity. So the schools I'll talk about today each found themselves asking how to manage that complexity in a way that was sustainable. So let's start with a school that is scaling over 1,000 clinical placements each semester across several prelicensure programs. Prior to CORE, this school is not using a software to help them maintain their clinical planning process. Instead, they were using spreadsheets, emails, more spreadsheets, and more emails. And so the details lived in several places while requiring access by students, staff, and faculty alike. So they needed a centralized system that would allow them to keep every aspect of clinicals in one place. So we're talking clinical site names, instructor names, course coordinator names, the schedules themselves, hours tracking, and plenty of other areas that fall in line with clinical plans. So when we began working together, it was important to take into consideration what their process had looked like before CORE, the same things that most of you are already familiar with. So the forecasting, you know, the number of students that might actually need to be in clinical ahead of that clinical semester starting, requesting enough availability, knowing course registrations ahead of actually assigning the clinical group so you don't accidentally schedule a student to a day that they might have the didactic portion, allowing students to give preferences, but maybe not too many preferences. So with all of that in mind, we were able to produce a process that allowed for details to be captured in the system. So in CORE, availability is collected from the local partners and then bulk imported into the system itself. Student preferences for clinical regions or locations, and simulation times are all captured through a survey and then added to student accounts through the use of what we call custom fields. So course registrations are also imported through custom fields ahead of each semester. The purpose of this is that importing this data then ensures that all the users involved in the scheduling process have visibility into all necessary details. While this is the current process, there is always room to explore other methods of collecting specifics, such as course registration through an API where we can automatically have information passed over back into our system and also allowing students to maybe update some of their custom fields when they log in. And so that point kinda taking it away from the school side where they don't have to go, you know, running a survey and pulling the data, and we're importing the custom fields. Instead, we have a time where we tell students, you know, these fields are open. Go in and update your preferences that are in there. We close it. They can no longer make their changes. Whatever is there is there. But, again, many different avenues and ways to explore to get this data and information into the system. That's the nice thing about CORE. There is often several ways to do something, and sometimes it is trialing options until you find what works best for you and your team. And I think the best thing about it all is that you always have a client success manager in your corner to help guide you. So this all leads to the number one goal, scheduling. So all these details are taken into account when it comes to scheduling students through both the SmartMatch and hand slotting functionalities. This team of individuals will run the SmartMatch based on individual region or the location preferences as well as simulation time. So, for example, like morning or afternoon or if we know that there's three time slots that can be offered for a course, offering up students the opportunity to give two preferences based on those three time slots. And so anyone who might not be familiar with our SmartMatch process, it's an automated way for a schedule to occur, based on what is available in the system itself, so site availability, and then also student preferences. So, again, if we're utilizing custom fields or if you're utilizing a functionality through the research center [flagged below for confirmation], which is another way to collect preferences, that's a bit more detailed, though. So you have that opportunity to show students, you know, specific days and times of the week, hospital names, units, etcetera. They can really get into the nitty gritty of what's available and make preferences off of it. But if you don't want to be so open for student preferences, then this school is utilizing that option to use custom fields, which still gives students a way to make those preferences, just, like I said, not as detailed. So hand slotting is also included, and it's an individual scheduling tool that also comes into play in a limited manner, usually a little bit before the SmartMatch, little bit after the SmartMatch. So if you think about it, let's say before a SmartMatch, you might need to place specific students that have to go somewhere. This isn't a site that can just be open to any and everyone. So I think what might resonate with some of you is something like the VA. Usually, there's a group of students that get cleared. We all know the clearance for the VA can take at least six weeks, sometimes more. So if there's eight students that need to go to the VA, they're a preselected group, they're a precleared group, we don't want other students running through the SmartMatch and getting scheduled there when they're not already a part of that group or cleared. So at that point, you would go in and you would be able to hand slot or manually put those students into those eight available spots. Or same thing after a SmartMatch. Let's say you get through the whole automated process. You've used as many preferences as you can. Maybe you find or you know from some faculty that a couple students shouldn't be together for whatever reason. So then at that point, once the SmartMatch is done, you can go back after the fact, review the schedules that were created, and then manually move students around. So those are just a couple examples. Clinical group schedules are then visible to both the clinical instructors and the students. Instructors can monitor the progression of their students through their submitted clinical hours, necessary evaluations, skills tracking, and many other areas. I always tell schools that automation doesn't replace coordinator expertise. It gives you a better starting point so you're spending your time making thoughtful adjustments instead of building schedules from scratch. And what I have here on the screen is just a quick little snippet from one of our accounts, where you can see when you go in to run a SmartMatch, if you're not familiar, you have the ability to select the actual course that you're hoping to do the scheduling for. You select the graduation year, so you pull in just those specific students. And then most importantly, just kinda showing you an example of what a custom field would look like if you wanted to pull that into the scheduling process through, again, that automated way, which is the SmartMatch. Alright. So let's move on to another school who relies heavily on Site Prospector. So I personally came from a school where students would identify and secure their own clinical placements each semester on the grad side, so through the NP tracks. And after that came all those checkboxes that needed to be complete before a student could start their clinical hours. So preceptor documentation. Do we have forms completed? Is the resume up to date? Are the nursing licensure, you know, active? Is anything expired? Do we need some more data on them? Student compliance. That's huge, whether it be the student, or, I'm sorry, the school side or the site side. Like, is the student clear, or do they have a new drug screen? Is there a background check? Are there immunizations in place? You know, is there really anything that needs to be done? Are we good in order for that student to be able to go off to the site? Affiliation agreements. That's probably one of the biggest pieces. So was there an active affiliation agreement? So all of those things, you know, that have to be done in order to say, okay. You are good to go to start on, you know, September first or whatever it is. So I was managing this on spreadsheets and emails for the most part. Very fun. So my system worked. But if someone else had come in and taken over, they were bound to miss something due to the several places that things lived. So not to mention, you know, my shorthand statuses. I had a column where I'd say, you know, like, AA active or AA being, you know, refined or being worked on or something of that nature. And then there's color coding galore. I can't even remember all the color coding systems that went on. But the point is is that I had so much living in my own head and then reflected on these spreadsheets that I feel like if somebody else came in, they wouldn't quite understand where the status was, you know, for the student to be able to go out. So has anyone inherited someone else's spreadsheet and had to figure it out? I cannot see you, but I mentioned that, and I asked that because I have a feeling that there are probably some people on this call who can probably, you know, attest to the fact that they too have been through this. Either it was their spreadsheet, and they're like, how am I gonna explain this to someone and where these statuses are for a student to go out, or you inherited somebody's. So one of the things, you know, that with the nursing school that I work with, they have a handful of NP tracks within their graduate program. And one of the things that they do so consistently and so well is tracking their student clinical submissions or as we call it in our system, Site Prospector submissions. So that's what I wanna walk through with you. So this school wanted every student-initiated placement request to follow the same process. So we leveraged another tool, and we called it, you know, it's called the Site Prospector submission tool. And so what they do is they are setting up Site Prospector, which allows the school to determine what information needs to be collected to approve or deny students' intended clinical path. So the student plans, the student secures, I should say, their clinical first with the preceptor or the site. They fill out the form with all the questions that the school has put together, you know, preceptor name, site name, is there a resume, CV, is there licensure, you know, how many years have they been practicing? Like, you all know the questions that you need fulfilled in order to actually say yay or nay to something. So these are the types of things that you can put out in the form. Students complete it, and they submit it, and then they wait for their final approval. So along the way, students, staff, and faculty can all monitor the progression of where that submission is and the decision process through what we call workflow steps. So this specific school has four workflow steps, which I think is the perfect setup. So they include a program director approval step so that submission comes in. You know, is it if this is a family nurse practitioner student, is the setting that they wanna go into or that they've secured appropriate? Or, you know, are they saying, like, this is a NICU experience, which we know is a specialty experience. And if hours are approved, it's probably going to be limited, and it can't fulfill, you know, all 150 hours or whatever there is. So program director approval, affiliation agreement is in place. So that's its own box on its own. Once you get there, it's a matter of ensuring that that value — I'm sorry, that affiliation agreement — is active. If it's not in place, then making sure that it's, you know, it started. That process can take a really long time. Sometimes it's fast, but sometimes it is really slow. Student compliance is complete, and then the placement is confirmed. So four total steps until they inevitably say, okay. You're in the green. You're ready to go for your clinical. So at any point, any user involved in the outcome of the submissions can see which step has completed. So here, this screenshot here shows you exactly that. So in the background, you kinda see what the student is gonna see. When they make their submissions along the way, they have that opportunity to see the site name. It's kind of its own folder. And so when they click on that site name folder, they can see anything that's pending, approved, denied, you name it. If it's pending, they have a little tab, like a little sticky note there. Click on it, and then what they're gonna see are the workflow steps that have to be completed. In this case, the example I use to show you three different workflow steps, none of which have been completed. So had something been completed already, the student, let's say, that initial approval, it would be green, and it would show a little check mark. It would say completed, and it would also show the name of the user in the system. So let's say the clinical coordinator or the faculty member that approved that step, and then the date it was done. And then at that point, they'd be able to see that the next two steps weren't completed. So the point of this is to try to get, you know, students to be able to monitor their progression without having to check in with, you know, faculty or the clinical coordinators. They can kind of watch it happen. So this school also has message templates set up to automatically release to the applicable users. And so when a decision has been made, they have put in the work on the front end to help streamline the process as they move semester to semester. We had a question. Can an affiliation agreement be housed or tracked in CORE? It can. So we actually have a couple opportunities. Just to touch on those briefly, we have a module called the Contract Manager. So contracts can be processed through there. It's an entire process that can be spit out all the way through DocuSign. And then other times, I oftentimes too see some schools just utilizing the Preceptor Requirements module, and they apply, you know, completed contracts that are done outside of ELMS inside just as a host, a place for them to stay so they can run reports and be able to see, you know, what has affiliation agreements and whatnot. So either one, Contract Manager or Requirements, they both work a little bit differently, but they both can track and store affiliation agreements. So great question. So one of the best things about Site Prospector is that until a submission has been fully confirmed, the schedule does not exist for the student, which means that submitting things like case hours and logs is not possible. So we all know that from a liability standpoint, all those checkboxes that we first started with have to be marked as complete before a student can start going to the site and actually taking care of patients. So if a schedule is not there and a student thinks I can start, well, they're not gonna have the opportunity to start tracking those case logs that are required. They can't start tracking those hours because there is no schedule living in ELMS that will allow them to do so. So fully complete and approved in order for that to happen. So for those of you in the audience, you may be considering how your team currently knows that every required approval has been completed before a student starts clinical. So in this final story, I wanna talk a bit about a school that came to CORE from another clinical education management software, I think just over a year ago now. The school did not have a clear picture into the data associated with the clinical schedules. There was no automated process flowing out to the preceptors, and reporting on completed clinical hours and patient case logs were cumbersome and required several reports and manual calculations. So they spent a lot of time running the data and kinda configuring it into a way that made sense to make sure that students were, you know, on par with where they needed to be. So let's say you have an FNP program with 50 students enrolled, and each student is tracking, I don't know, 180 hours a semester. They're submitting on average 8 to 10 patient case logs per clinical day. And then you need to find a way to not only track this data, but you need a way for preceptors to sign off on at least the hours. So that's a lot of data and connecting the dots to ensure students are on track. So insert what can happen inside of ELMS, which is what this program is taken advantage of. So through implementation and the relationship that I've continued with them as their client success manager, we've implemented their processes and needs into CORE to ensure that everything is accessible in one place. Not only are students' schedules in CORE, but students track their daily clinical hours and their patient case logs. Preceptors receive one email per scheduled student every two weeks alerting them of the pending hour submissions. The preceptor opens the link automatically sent to them and reviews the submitted details, and then they confirm or deny. So the information then goes directly back to being tracked in CORE. This information can be pulled in a detailed or summary report by students and staff or faculty at any point during the progression of a student's clinical. So that's the technical explanation of what this program built in CORE. But from a bird's eye view, I'd say that they built a process that gives them the confidence that they can identify when a student has fallen behind before the end of the semester instead of discovering it after the rotation is over. And I am curious, and, again, not being able to see you all, how many of you have run into it? You know, you got a couple weeks left of the semester, and you realize the student still has, like, I don't know, 60 hours to complete, 80 hours to complete, like, something where they're gonna have to jam-pack it in. So having the ability to get everything into the system, get confirmed or denied, and then be able to monitor and track that progression throughout so that you know that they don't have to backfill a certain amount of hours and that there's this steady release of it, I think that's always really beneficial. Alright. So remember earlier when we talked about preceptors? So here's what they actually experience. So in that last slide, I was talking about how, you know, we push out the fact that an automated alert goes out to the preceptor. Here's an example what the preceptor would receive in their email when a school sets up the ability for CORE to automatically send a student submitted clinical hours in a predetermined cadence. So we have the opportunity for hours or case logs to be sent out daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly. When sent out on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly cadence, they get sent out in bulk. So one student, with everything that they've done within that week, two weeks, whatever the cadence is, gets sent out in one email as you see on the left-hand side there. So that student would have sent two submissions for hours within a biweekly cadence. And then once the preceptor opens up each of those blue buttons, they would then be able to go in and confirm or deny each submission individually. And then as soon as they do so, that automatically gets updated in the system on the minute. So at the end of the day, the school has learned that the automation process that exists in CORE is extremely helpful. It's helping them to ensure that they're getting accurate data, that their students aren't just saying that they're getting hours done, but instead, it's actually going to the person they did the hours with. And then at that point, they have the ability to track and monitor students' progression at any time over the course of the clinical or the student's plan of study, really any time at all. So I hope that these stories have resonated with your clinical experience. You will see a poll pop up on your screen if you'd like to learn more about how CORE can support your program. So whether you are currently a CORE client or someone who is exploring new systems, there are many ways to use CORE to ensure your process can exist in one place from start to finish. Our goal isn't to make you start over. It's to make sure that the clinical coordination is easier to manage as your program grows. Keep in mind too, these were just three stories. There's ample opportunity within the system. And even within one specific story, there are several different ways to make it happen. So I just wanted to highlight a few of those. And so, hopefully, like I said, hopefully, at least a couple of them or at least one has actually resonated. Alright. So we had one question earlier. I will open up to Q&A if anyone else has any outstanding questions that they haven't asked yet. I'm gonna leave it here for a minute just in case we're thinking about it. So one thing I did just see come in, can we run a SmartMatch without taking preferences into consideration? And the answer is yes. You can. So I talked about that SmartMatch process and incorporating preferences, whether it's through custom fields or whether it's through, our research center [flagged below for confirmation], which, like I said, really gives students the details to be able to make preferences on the availability. So SmartMatch also works as what we call a QuickPicks option. So instead of taking preferences into consideration, we just run a random selection. So we take any of the availability that you've put into the system. And at that point, we still have to filter, you know, like, which class cohort or Grad Year are we trying to schedule and then which class are we trying to schedule them to. So once we have just a couple of those basic filters selected, we use the QuickPicks and run it. And what it does is it just schedules those students to those courses in a random fashion. So no preferences are taken into place with that. Can reports be filtered by program or cohort? Yes. There are several ways that you can run reports. You can run reports based on specific semesters or rotation dates as well as specific courses. So if you wanna run, let's say, a Fall 2026 schedule report, you don't need to run it for every single course that might be happening. You can run it for just Fall 2026, course ABC123. You can also run, you know, any report based on the class of, like, May 2027 or December or whatever it might be. So great questions. And how long does implementation take? So on average, about 12 weeks implementation will take. So it's all dependent upon, you know, we start with a kickoff call. We do certain discovery calls with our implementation manager that's assigned to the program once you start. And then from there, there will be several calls between the discovery call and then inevitably wrapping up. And so during that time, there's a number of deliverables that we ask from clients. And so as long as things are staying on track, we're getting what we need, etcetera, and everything is being built out with no big issues, you inevitably move over to your client success manager for training and for going live, as we call it, in typically about 12 weeks. Is there a limit to the number of workflow steps and or complexity of workflow steps in the Site Prospector? I guess the complexity piece is something I'm not entirely clear on, but number of workflow steps, no. I obviously gave an example of a school that uses four because that's what works best for them, and it's real clean and to the point. However, there are other schools I work with who have, you know, like, eight steps, ten steps. It just kinda depends on what is needed. So no real limitation. And what is the cost of the program? That is something that we would love for you to talk about with our sales team to get a demo, discuss, you know, contracts, number of students, etcetera. So great question. Alright. Well, it looks like we don't have any other questions at this point. So thank you so much for spending your time with me today, and I hope you all have a great rest of your day.