In certain Hiring cases, specifically higher ranks such as an associate or full Professor, the Medical School allows faculty to be initially appointed as a Clinical Instructor, while their main appointment is still being completed. This allows the faculty member to arrive at Michigan Medicine sooner, as well as enables Credentialing and Enrollment to be conducted earlier, as those processes typically need to wait for a faculty member to have an appointment before credentialing and enrollment can finish.

As of March 2023, Meridian now supports this addition of an initial Clinical Instructor appointment, on top of the main higher-ranked new faculty appointment. This seamless integration means that you do not need to create and manage two separate workflows to handle this special situation; in fact, these two appointments will share much information, notably the same Seat ID (PCN).

In order to add an initial clinical instructor appointment, department users must contact their OFA specialist, as a conversation must happen first. Once approved, the OFA specialist will push the "Add Initial Appt" button, which will add the "Initial Appt (Clinical Instructor)" section to the top of the existing Hiring workflow.

The Initial Appointment section is similar to other sections in Hiring, with input fields, blue submit buttons, statuses, and Messages. As you may expect, different roles have different responsibilities in this new section. The specific inputs and functionality within it are:

• Job Posting fields
  • OFA completes these
• Supporting Documents fields
  • Dept users complete these, OFA approves
• Academic Reference Letter functionality
  • Dept users do these, OFA approves
• Committee Approvals (i.e. Packets)
  • OFA does this

Note that all the data and documents needed for a standard Clinical Instructor position are not present in this Initial Appointment section. That is because duplicate data (such as basic candidate identifiers, seat/PCN, and background check, among many others) are shared between the initial and main appointments. Only the data and documents unique to this add-on clinical instructor position (such as Initial Start Date, a potentially different offer letter, separate reference letters, and the committee packet) are separately collected.

Due to this purposeful sharing (which reduces duplication of effort in gathering data and documents), it is intended that the initial appointment and the 'main' (higher-ranked) appointment be completed in concert with each other. For example, the CV is needed to send out reference letter requests for the initial appointment, yet the CV is collected in the main Appointing section, which does not open until background check is completed (or skipped), which is also done only on the main appointment. OFA will be monitoring and looking at data and documents across both the initial and main appointment sections for candidates in this scenario, and so it is important to be aware of this.

Once the Initial Appointment packet is approved, the section is marked as Approved and the status dot will turn blue (similar to other completed sections in the Hiring workflow). This is the indication that this initial appointment is complete, and is the trigger that Credentialing and Enrollment can be conducted on this candidate.

Note that, for simplicity, Meridian will show Credentialing and Enrollment occurring on the main appointment's workflow; in actuality, the faculty candidate themself is being credentialed and enrolled, regardless of which appointment they have or will have.

Finding Candidates with Initial Appointments on the Hiring List

Once an initial appointment has been added, it will be visible on the candidate 'card' on the Hiring List page:

There are also some newly added Sort and Filter options to help find these special situations:

Using the Filter menu, there is a new Status option called "Initial Appt (Clinical Instructor)" which allows you to filter your list to just those candidates with this add-on initial appointment (and even specifically which status step they are in). 

Using the Sort menu, you can use the new "Initial Start Date" option to reorder your list to show at the top those candidates with this add-on initial appointment, ordered by date.