Clinical Placement System (CLIPS) has been adopted by health science departments to plan and assign students to clinical placement blocks. The same system also supports Clinical Educators (CEs) to track placement student roster, student vaccine and RAT compliance status and conduct placement performance assessment. Students can leverage CLIPS to find out location of CEs, file their RAT test result and apply leave while departments can leverage CLIPS to prepare report and conduct analysis of student performance during clinical placement period.
Core functions/features covered in CLIPS:
Allocation
This feature automatically allocates students to clinical blocks, taking into account the defined time periods, clinical hour requirements, location capacities, specialty requirements, student preferences, etc. The allocation engine can be customized according to the specific needs of individual departments. Instead of manually performing the allocation on Excel worksheets, automatic allocation can save weeks of time while allowing adjustment before publishing the allocation results to students.
Leave Application and Approval
Leave applications and approvals are recorded properly in the system with pre-defined workflow where emails are sent to notify relevant parties on the workflow. The updated leave records are reflected on the progress of individual student as well as on the daily roster view.
Announcement
Announcement can be made to groups of students attached to a location. It can be served as reminders for some planned activities, or important notices in particular ad-hoc situations like change of schedule or assembly place.
Accomplishment
Pre-requisite requirements must be accomplished before a student reports for duty at assigned ward at CEs. Each department can define their own rules / requirements of accomplishment. (e.g. Daily reporting of rapid antigen test result during the current pandemic situation.) The automation and self-reporting mechanism have greatly saved the efforts of administration and communication among students, clinical educators and clinical placement administrators.
Assessment
Student performance is assessed by CEs and the assessment results together with feedbacks from assessors are recorded and used for grading of the clinical subjects. Other than assessment, forms in different formats, such as work logs and progress reports, can be customized and added to CLIPS for clinical educators and students to record the placement progress and activities.
Clinical Educator Portal and Student Portal
These portals are single points of entry designed especially for clinical educators and students respectively. Useful functions are put together where they can access easily to manage their daily activities such as reviewing daily roster and announcements, checking pre-requisites for placement, applying / approving leave requests, and completing assessment forms.
Reporting
Operational and analytic reports can be customized per individual department academic program according to their needs. Since data is not scattered around in Excel worksheets anymore, CLIPS can easily retrieve relevant data from a single source and produce up-to-date reports.
CLIPS has been in production to support the end-to-end clinical placement process of Department of Health Technology and Informatics (HTI) since August 2021 and it is also ready to be rolled out to other health science departments in PolyU with similar clinical placement requirements in phases.
