Beginning with staff and faculty of the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, VU Card Services will replace employee identification badges with a newly designed, contactless “smart” card.
Re-carding of other Medical Center areas will follow, said Rick Wood, director of Business Services, who has oversight of Card Services.
There is no charge to employees for this card replacement as long as the existing card is turned in at the time of the replacement. All cards will be replaced.
“The new card will provide greater security to all employees by removing personal information from the card’s magnetic stripe,” Wood said.
“The new card also contains contactless technology, which is a pivotal component of the Virtual Clinical Workstation project that has been introduced by VUMC, as well as future applications.”
Information contained on the redesigned card may also include changes to employee titles and credentials in order to standardize these values.
According to the FAQs at the Card Services site, “VUMC and Human Resource Management have reviewed the department names, titles and credentials. This information will be standardized and streamlined to create uniformity throughout the Medical Center.
To streamline logistics of issuing thousands of new IDs, the employee photograph already on file in the system will be used on the new badge.
Although the old badge design has been updated, the existing color-coding plan will remain the same for the new cards. Clinical staff will have a colored band, and the color coding is as follows:
• Non-clinical staff or non-clinical faculty: No color
• Paramedics: Red band
• Registered Nurse: Light blue band
• Licensed Practical Nurse: Titan blue band
• Advance Practice Nursing or Physician’s Assistant: Dark blue band
• Resident/Clinical Fellow: Light green band
• Clinical Physician and/or Clinical Faculty: Dark green band
• Respiratory Care: Gold band
Infant handlers will also have a pink accent band along with the designated color band.
The process for exchanging the current badge for the new card in Children’s Hospital will begin Friday, Feb. 7.
Department contacts, in conjunction with Vanderbilt Card Services, will contact employees by email with detailed instructions for obtaining their new card at the appropriate time.
“The re-carding schedule will allow employees working any shift to replace their card,” Wood said.
Building access, debit spending funds, Metro bus access, access to the Kronos time system and other services will automatically transfer to the new card.
However, there may be up to a 12-hour delay for Kronos to be updated with the new card data.
As a result, employees may need to enter their employee ID number to record their time if the new card does not work immediately (Instructions to record time using employee ID are displayed above each reader).
Also, employees using the Virtual Clinical Workstation application may experience a delay of up to one hour before it is updated. However, employees may access workstations using their VUnetID during this period.
More re-carding information is available in the FAQ section of the Vanderbilt Card Services web-site or by contacting a Vanderbilt Card Services representative at newcard@vanderbilt.edu or 936-3350.
