Physician Assistant: Best Practices for Utilizing Placement Assist

This Exxat Prism webinar focused on Placement Assist, the platform's automated clinical placement tool, with an emphasis on how PA programs can use it strategically for both core and elective rotations. The session walked through foundational setup decisions — including course and setting configuration, site labeling, and advanced schedule options — before exploring placement strategies that balance automation with program-specific judgment. Joanna also delivered a live demonstration showing how to configure Placement Assist runs, apply weighting and custom rules, review analytics, and finalize placements at scale.

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Key Takeaways

• A strong foundation drives clean results. Before running Placement Assist, programs must verify that courses, dates, site settings, specialty labels, and slot-to-rotation assignments are configured correctly. Placement Assist will surface existing data problems, so early setup accuracy prevents larger placement issues downstream.

   

• Placement Assist does not have to be all-or-nothing. Programs can start small — running it for just core rotations, just electives, or a single rotation block — and expand over time. It can also be run in staged phases (e.g., rotations 1–5 first, then 6–10) or as a test against past data using the "include placed students and used slots" option to see what the system would have recommended.

   

• Advanced features allow fine-tuned control. Programs can apply weighting to prioritize community partnership slots marked as "must be filled," limit overlapping placements, set custom rules (e.g., limit how often a student is placed in the same setting), include or exclude tentative slots, and rank specific settings higher when slots are harder to fill (such as women's health or pediatrics).

   

• Wish lists and Placement Assist work together but are independent. Wish lists are not required to use Placement Assist, but when used, giving students more choices and a shorter completion window improves results and student satisfaction. For high-demand electives, allowing students to choose a setting rather than a specific site distributes placements more equitably across vetted providers.

   

• Consistency and randomization support fairness. Applying the same rules across all students — and being able to explain the process simply — reduces bias and reliance on memory or informal notes. Because Placement Assist includes built-in randomization, rerunning the same configuration can produce different results, allowing administrators to compare runs (it's recommended to name each run) before committing to placements.

Your Presenters:
Jenn Miller, DMS, PA-C, Jenn currently serves as the Director of Clinical Education at Shenandoah University's PA Program, where she oversees the clinical phase of the PA curriculum and works closely with students, preceptors, and faculty to ensure high-quality experiential learning. She regularly utilizes the placement assist feature in Exxat Prism to provide quality clinical experiences to her students while ensuring their placement needs are met.

Joanna Perry, Associate Director of Account Management, Joanna has previous experience as an administrator helping manage student placements at a PA program prior to joining Exxat. She is passionate about supporting her clients across all disciplines further develop their programs, ensure student success, and utilize Exxat Prism as a program management tool.