Virtual care is rapidly changing the healthcare landscape, offering innovative solutions to age-old challenges. But successful implementation requires a strong partnership between IT and clinical leaders.
Two healthcare leaders who exemplify the gold standard of this partnership are Regina Foley, EVP and Chief Nurse Executive at Hackensack Meridian Health, and Dr. Nick Patel, CEO of Stealth Consulting.
Here are five of their recommended best practices for seamless collaboration:
1. Start with the Clinical Need, Not the Technology:
Define the problem: What are you trying to solve? Is it nurse burnout, patient satisfaction, or access to care?
Focus on solutions: How can technology improve workflows, reduce administrative burdens, and enhance patient care?
Avoid the “shiny object” syndrome: Don’t get distracted by the latest gadgets. Choose technology that truly addresses your needs.
2. Foster a Culture of Collaboration and Trust:
Leave egos at the door: Encourage open communication and mutual respect between IT and clinical teams.
Build a shared vision: Ensure both teams understand the goals and are working towards the same outcomes.
Break down silos: Promote cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing.
3. Conduct Thorough Due Diligence:
Assess existing resources: What technology and infrastructure do you already have?
Evaluate potential solutions: Carefully consider the capabilities, costs, and integration requirements of new technologies.
Involve clinicians in the process: Ensure their input is valued and incorporated into decision-making.
4. Prioritize Training and Education:
Provide comprehensive training: Ensure both IT and clinical staff are comfortable using and supporting new technologies.
Offer ongoing support: Address questions, concerns, and challenges that arise during implementation.
Foster a culture of continuous learning: Encourage both teams to stay abreast of the latest advancements in virtual care.
5. Embrace AI Cautiously and Strategically:
Focus on data quality: Ensure your data is accurate, complete, and unbiased before implementing AI solutions.
Start with specific use cases: Prioritize areas where AI can have the greatest impact, such as clinical documentation and decision support.
Involve clinicians in AI development: Ensure their expertise is incorporated into the design and implementation of AI algorithms.
Bonus Tip: Don’t be afraid to learn from others! Network with colleagues, attend conferences, and share best practices to accelerate your virtual care journey.
By following these guidelines, IT and clinical leaders can forge a powerful partnership that drives innovation, improves patient outcomes, and transforms the future of healthcare.
Falls among VA hospitalized patients are a serious concern and can lead to injuries and increased healthcare costs, often requiring additional treatment and prolonged hospital stays. A recent 8-hospital analysis of over 10,000 patients falls cited by JAMA showed that a fall with any injury is associated with a cost increase of $36,776 and doubles the length of stay.
In VA hospitals, where patients often have more chronic conditions that contribute to a greater falls risk, prevention is critical. Staffing shortages, particularly among Patient Care Technicians and Certified Nursing Assistants, have exacerbated patient safety concerns, with patient falls rising 253% from 2020 to 2022.1 In response, the Veterans Health Administration introduced the SAFE STEPS for Veterans Act in 2024, creating an Office of Falls Prevention.
Addressing Patient Safety Challenges
Facing labor shortages and escalating costs, VA hospitals across the country have turned to virtual sitting, a replacement for traditional one-to-one sitting. Virtual sitting reduces the need for 1:1 sitting by 75% or more, freeing up clinician’s time and headspace for other valuable work.
With AvaSure’s virtual care platform for virtual sitting, a Virtual Safety Attendant (VSA) can oversee up to 16 veterans at once, using an intelligent, AI-enabled platform to identify patients at risk of a fall and verbally redirect them back to safety. If necessary, the VSA can issue a stat alarm, a loud, in-room alarm that draws nearby caregivers to the room in an emergency with an average response time of 20 seconds2. Freeing up CNAs and nurses from one-to-one sitting allows them to move back to the bedside for more direct patient care activities.
An important aspect of virtual sitting is assessing patients individually to determine whether virtual sitting will meet their needs. Conditions typically monitored by virtual sitters include general safety concerns, such as high fall risk, drug or alcohol withdrawal, confusion, agitation, and elopement risk, and failure to follow safety instructions, such as leaving the unit without notifying staff.
Success Stories in Virtual Sitting Implementation for VA Fall Prevention
AvaSure’s virtual care platform is implemented in 45 VA hospitals across the country. For more success stories, check out the whitepaper on VA Fall Prevention.
Fayetteville VA Hospitals
Fayetteville VA hospitals were recently recognized with the 2024 VA Excellence Award when their virtual care program soared to 80% utilization in just six months, highlighting their strong leadership, organization, and commitment to success. Their journey serves as an inspiring model for other VA facilities, proving that with the right strategies and dedication, significant progress can be achieved in a short time.
VA North Texas
Facing labor shortages and escalating costs, VA North Texas implemented a virtual sitting program. At the heart of the program is a centralized monitoring hub, allowing 4 virtual safety attendants to oversee a total of 48 patients to reduce falls.
Since implementing the program, VA North Texas freed up bedside care teams for direct patient care and decreased 1:1 sitter usage, saving the program an average of 83 full-time equivalents per month – an annual savings of $3.4 million. The efficiency gains are substantial, with costs per virtual sitting hour reduced to $3.05 compared to $26 for one-to-one sitters. VA fall rates plummeted by nearly 20%, well below national averages. Learn more about VA North Texas Program
For health systems, one-to-one sitters represent a costly drain on resources that do little to improve patient safety. With virtual sitting, health systems such as VA’s have prioritized fall prevention and created better patient outcomes while delivering staff cost savings that can be invested back into direct patient care.
AvaSure’s Intelligent Virtual Care Platform is deployed in 45 VA hospitals across the country, helping make significant strides in VA fall prevention and patient safety. By leveraging technology and data-driven insights, these hospitals are creating a safer environment for veterans and their caregivers.
In recent memory, no technology has so quickly penetrated the cultural zeitgeist as artificial intelligence (AI). At an ever-increasing pace, AI is being hailed as the hero capable of fixing everything from world hunger to climate change. Companies across the globe are racing to utilize AI to automate, simplify, and rationalize manual tasks across every industry, including healthcare.
At the same time, healthcare has been grappling with tremendous cost pressure & staffing shortages for years. Over the past decade, hospitals have focused on utilizing technology to help drive significant change through:
Digitization of documentation and communication tools
Consolidation of health systems in search of economies of scale
Virtualization of traditional care models to include remote caregivers and stakeholders
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic poured gasoline over the fire of those pressures; and hospitals quickly implemented changes to adapt. In many cases, integrated tools are not delivering the simplicity needed; shared data is not delivering the actionable insights that caregivers need; and automation is not allowing care teams to scale that care to an increasing number of patients.
Clearly, there’s no “silver bullet” to remedy all the chaos and pressure. Many key plays need to be run, integrations must deepen, technology needs to be more open to 3rd party access, and virtual experience needs to seamlessly merge with care workflows.
How can AI in healthcare help?
As an industry, we seem to latch on to the hope of the next big thing. Waves of opportunity have come our way with Meaningful Use, Actionable Insights, multi-use case infrastructure like Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS), and more. What does that mean for AI? How can we focus our efforts to soak up as much of the wave as it rolls in?
There are a few key questions we need to answer in determining if utilizing AI in healthcare will truly be the savior it needs, or if it’s just another passing technology fad that won’t deliver on its promises:
What is AI? What use case examples of AI in healthcare are primed for change? What risks need to be top of mind when implementing AI in healthcare settings? How can those risks be mitigated?
What is AI?
Let’s tackle what that term, “artificial intelligence,” means. Promising examples of AI in healthcare settings include references to the following technologies:
Natural Language Processing (NLP) – helps take data from unstructured to structured
Conversational Bots – virtual agents that manage conversations with patients via text, IM, etc.
Predictive analytics – mines data to plug into algorithms that project things like patient risk
Ambient Listening – listens to live audio to turn conversations into notes or identify risks
Computer Vision – watches live video to identify patterns or risks
Remote Patient Monitoring – uses data from medical devices to anticipate risks or care needs
What use case examples of AI in healthcare are primed for change?
Despite AI’s newfound popularity, some technologies on the list above have been around in healthcare for years. NLP is being used to turn dictated notes into actionable work, like orders, and Predictive Analytics are employed by Populational Health technologies to help target specific populations for focused care based on their risk.
So, if AI in healthcare isn’t anything new, why is it so prevalent in today’s industry discussions? For one, the underlying technology has changed and improved very quickly, making it a more powerful tool. For another, the volume of data needed to improve AI models is becoming more manageable to achieve. As a perfect example, ChatGPT-4 took social media by storm as people began asking for AI to produce legal contracts, bedtime stories for their kids, and essays for homework assignments. Mere weeks later, new forms of this AI were appearing as Chrome extensions that were already better, faster, and stronger than the ones before. The more AI is used, the more valuable it will become because every use provides meaningful learning.
All this progress makes the potential for AI in healthcare more optimistic. Experts agree that, among other things, AI will be key in supporting the push towards more impactful virtual care models. More specifically, this will be achieved through the use of predictive analytics, computer vision, and ambient listening.
During the time that AI entered the conversation, two other important advancements also happened:
Technology continued to get faster, stronger, and cheaper. Cameras, microphones, speakers, and other equipment necessary to facilitate virtual interactions are now available in more patient rooms than ever before.
The COVID-19 pandemic opened patients’ and caregivers’ eyes to virtual care, making these interactions more trusted and commonplace.
AI can help turn heavily user dependent devices into seamlessly integrated, clinical workflow-enabling devices. We are entering a moment where the true potential of virtual care is being unlocked, facilitated by the growing prospect of the availability of an AI-enabled virtual care device in every hospital room.
What risks need to be top of mind when implementing AI in healthcare settings?
While one may not be worried about what’s at stake when using AI to help write a bedtime story, the stakes of healthcare are much higher. AI-enabled devices in every hospital room could bring virtual care to life, but there are important questions to consider.
Are cameras and speakers now the equivalent of a door to the patient room?
Who decides when the door should be open or closed?
How do patients, staff, and visitors know that the doors are open, and what does that mean?
What happens if multiple virtual care team members try to open that door and walk in at the same time?
Which patients do, or do not, qualify for virtual care models and participation?
The list goes on….
So, is AI just a short-lived buzzword, or are there clinically relevant use cases that you can take advantage of? Industry experience tells us to avoid getting our hopes up, else our belief in a healthy future might be dashed. We now know that failure is not an option. If we can all see the challenges for what they are and take a mindful approach to what and how we implement, then AI in healthcare may be the ‘silver bullet’ we’ve been promised for years.
By Lisbeth Votruba, MSN, RN, Chief Clinical Officer
The Goal: • Improve patient safety • Reduce fall risk • Increase access to specialty care • Free up CNA and bedside nurses for other activities
The Results: 1. Success of the virtual sitting program: • Saved costs • Improved patient and staff satisfaction 2. Progression into virtual nursing: • Utilization of the same technology • Further cost savings • Enhanced patient and staff satisfaction
Nursing shortages and associated costs are not going away. While RN turnover has dropped from 22.5% in 2022 to 18.4% in 2023, the turnover rate for nursing assistants increased from 33.7% to 41.8% in the same period. And the ongoing costs as nurses continue to leave the profession are high. Each RN that leaves costs an average hospital $56,350, totaling roughly $4M – $6M per year, according to the 2024 NSI National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report. Bottom line: nurses need sustained support or the profession will continue to decline in well-being and in numbers.
These challenges hit particularly hard in smaller, community-based organizations. Holzer Health System is a not-for-profit, multi-disciplinary regional health system that provides the full continuum of care for its communities with locations throughout southeastern Ohio and western West Virginia. The system includes two hospital locations, including a rural critical access hospital, as well as multiple clinical locations, long-term care entities, and more than 180 providers in more than 30 medical specialties.
Matthew L. Hemphill MSN, RN, CNML, Director of Acute Care Nursing at Holzer Health System, described the problem: “We want to keep as many of our patients here rather than transferring them out to the nearest tertiary center two hours away. While we did have a small pool of one-to-one sitters, staffing was a challenge. Many needs were going unmet. There were numerous patients who required more monitoring than we could offer.”
Improving care, beginning with virtual sitting
The COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse, so Holzer had to come up with a workable plan that would allow it to augment its existing staff while keeping a larger volume of patients safe.
Holzer undertook a major initiative to improve patient safety, reduce fall risk and increase access to specialty care by securing a grant through the FCC COVID-19 Telehealth Program to implement an inpatient virtual sitting solution.
With the aid of the grant, Holzer implemented AvaSure’s virtual care technology to support virtual sitters, who watch over patients via video-and-audio connections to enhance patient safety, such as reducing patient falls and elopement. The health system implemented 16 devices, including four ceiling-mounted devices, 12 mobile devices and a centralized monitoring station. The primary goal was to enable and expand the use of virtual sitters, freeing up CNAs and bedside nurses for other care activities.
After seeing the virtual sitting program’s success in saving costs, as well as improving patient and staff satisfaction, the health system progressed into virtual nursing using the same technology platform. AvaSure’s intelligent virtual care platform enables virtual sitting, virtual nursing and specialty medical consults.
Progressing to inpatient virtual nursing and realizing multiple improvements
When Holzer progressed from virtual sitting to virtual nursing, one key principle it followed was to structure the use of virtual sitters and nurses so that all nurses work at the top of their licenses. This enables a care model where RNs, CNAs, and VRNs perform the most-appropriate patient care activities based on their skills and experience.
Using the AvaSure platform, scarce specialists in neurology, nephrology, diabetes education and wound care can serve more patients in both facilities, the main Gallipolis Hospital and the rural critical access Jackson Hospital.
For example, Holzer has one certified wound and ostomy nurse (CWON) serving both facilities, located 30 miles apart. Natalie Gardner BSN, RN, CWON, CFCS, described the benefits: “This has provided a way for me to do video consults with the Jackson facility which saves precious time as well as mileage. The staff take the device to the patient’s room, remove their dressings, and position the patient so that I can see the wound. This leaves me more time to spend with all patients by eliminating the time it would take to drive to Jackson and back.” Giving patients easier access to specialists improves care and facilitates early intervention to prevent transfers from the critical access hospital to the main facility.
Continuing to hone the virtual nursing program
For community health systems, the strain on resources will continue for the foreseeable future. Progressing on a path from virtual sitting to virtual nursing extends precious resources to enable high quality patient care, while allowing all nursing staff to work at the top of their skills and licenses. Holzer is continuing its path to expand its virtual nursing program to encompass more activities across more inpatient care units. At every stage, Holzer is delivering better patient outcomes while enabling a care model that gives nurses more time for their most satisfying work – spending time on direct patient care.
Caregivers can now provide thoughtful care from anywhere with a fast, reliable two-way connection that supports virtual care for admission, discharge, specialty consults, rounding, and more.
AvaSure Episodic™ Solution
Virtual care is essential to adapt
As healthcare systems grapple with rising costs, staffing shortages, and increasing complexity of patient care, the urgency for change is at an all-time high. With a staggering 22.7% turnover rate among staff, hospitals struggle to uphold their commitment to patient care. Amidst these challenges, there’s a growing recognition that digital transformation measures are essential.
Hospitals across the world are adopting virtual care solutions to alleviate the mounting pressures facing healthcare systems globally. This signals a brighter future for both patients and healthcare providers alike. Using technology to facilitate remote consultations, monitoring, and support, virtual care offers a pathway toward improved staff satisfaction, enhanced patient experiences, better health outcomes, and more efficient hospital operations. With the right virtual care platform, hospitals can redefine patient experiences and revolutionize the way healthcare services are delivered.
The path to virtual care isn’t always clear
As hospitals and health systems embark on the journey toward the hospital room of the future, the road is fraught with obstacles, requiring hospitals to confront complex issues head-on. Historically, hospitals have adopted point solutions to address specific virtual care needs, resulting in fragmented systems and siloed approaches. Now, there is a growing recognition of the need to consolidate these disparate solutions into integrated virtual care platforms that can scale across the entire enterprise. Such endeavors require a significant investment, posing financial constraints for resource-strapped healthcare institutions. Without a clear adoption model that demonstrates ROI, hospitals struggle to build the business case for virtual care, further complicating the decision-making process.
Amidst this backdrop, hospitals are piloting virtual care platforms, each with varying levels of success and clinical adoption. The stakes are high, as the initial impression of these pilots can significantly influence the trust that caregivers have in these technologies to deliver on their promise. Hospitals must tread carefully, ensuring that their chosen solutions and partners not only meet the clinical needs of their patients but also garner widespread acceptance and support from healthcare professionals. Support from clinical, IT, and finance departments paves the way for successful implementation and integration into routine care delivery practices.
Episodic™ Care solution powered by AvaSure’s Intelligent Virtual Care Platform
Step into the hospital of the future with AvaSure’s new virtual care solution, AvaSure Episodic™. Designed in close collaboration with clinicians and technical experts, AvaSure Episodic delivers a reliable two-way video solution designed to scale to the entire enterprise.
With the AvaSure Episodic solution, caregivers gain full control over the quality of remote, consultative patient interactions. It enables two-way video with group calling and polite entry, allowing for specialty consults, admitting and discharging patients, rounding, and more. Virtual care with the Episodic solution frees up time for nursing and support staff, enables seamless remote nursing workflows, and allows collaboration with specialists across the country. With AvaSure, clinicians can achieve more without stretching themselves thin.
Highlights:
Group calling to include multiple parties: Care teams can easily invite family members, interpreters, caregivers, and consulting specialists from multiple locations to join a group session, saving time and making conversations more efficient.
Polite entry to patient rooms: Caregivers respect patients’ privacy by notifying patients before entering the room virtually with a doorbell chime, allowing them time to accept the call.
Web-based access: Neither caregivers nor families need to download anything – all access to episodic care sessions is delivered via a web browser, whether on mobile or desktop.
Fast, reliable two-way video: Clinicians admit and discharge patients remotely, engage with them on rounds, connect with specialists in other locations, and provide training and mentoring to other staff members using portable, flexible devices with high-fidelity cameras.
Integration with Epic: Caregivers can easily launch virtual patient visits from Epic without disrupting their workflow, creating a seamless experience.
The ability for a variety of caregivers to connect with a patient, whether it is a nurse, physician, specialist, or case manager, opens a whole realm of possibilities to drive better patient experience, more efficient operations, and reduced burden on bedside staff. AvaSure’s Intelligent Virtual Care Platform allows healthcare teams to seamlessly integrate in-person and virtual caregivers, promoting continuity of care and ensuring treatment plans are tailored to individual needs. Interpreters and family members can also participate in virtual group interactions to simplify communication. By leveraging AvaSure to involve a diverse range of caregivers in patient care, healthcare organizations can optimize resource utilization, streamline workflows, and alleviate pressure on frontline staff, ultimately enhancing the quality of care and patient outcomes.
The AvaSure Episodic solution can support a variety of virtual care workflows for virtual nurses, physicians, specialists, and other caregivers, including:
Admission and discharge documentation: Virtual caregivers streamline the admission and discharge documentation process by securely reviewing, capturing, and updating patient records remotely. This reduces administrative burden, minimizes errors, and ensures accurate and efficient documentation, enabling smoother transitions of care for patients.
Patient education: Patients can benefit from virtual education sessions delivered by healthcare professionals, empowering them with knowledge and resources to better understand their conditions, treatments, and self-care strategies, decreasing the risk of readmissions.
Novice nurse mentorship: Novice nurses receive guidance, feedback, and support from experienced mentors remotely, often offering a second set of eyes for high-risk medications or patient assessments. Mentors can observe, assess, and provide tailored coaching to help novice nurses develop clinical skills, confidence, and competence in their practice, ultimately improving patient outcomes and enhancing the overall quality of care delivery.
Specialty consults: Care teams can easily connect with specialty consultants through virtual care platforms, enabling timely consultations and interdisciplinary collaboration, ensuring that patients receive the most appropriate and effective care tailored to their needs.
Proactive rounding: Virtual rounding enables care teams to conduct proactive check-ins with patients remotely, ensuring ongoing monitoring of their condition, progress, and satisfaction. Through video conferencing or virtual visits, healthcare providers can address any concerns, provide emotional support, and reinforce treatment plans, promoting continuity of care and patient-centered communication.
One platform can change everything
The ideal virtual care platform must meet the criteria set by both clinical and IT leaders. In addition to essential hardware and monitoring software, today’s virtual care platforms must meet increasingly high enterprise-level IT standards. They should operate on open, scalable infrastructure to seamlessly integrate with existing systems, ensuring minimal downtime and optimal connectivity for care teams. They should include robust analytics and an intelligence layer for generating clear, measurable outcomes, along with AI capabilities to enhance patient safety and alleviate the workload of virtual staff. Most importantly, access to comprehensive support is essential, particularly for clinical teams navigating change management and envisioning a sustainable virtual care strategy. That’s a tall order.
AvaSure is the only virtual care platform that fulfills each of these crucial requirements, continuously innovating while demonstrating a proven record of clinical outcomes. Hospitals use AvaSure for AI-powered continuous monitoring, episodic care, and building a greater ecosystem of solutions and workflows that transform the hybrid care delivery model. Our team of experienced nursing and healthcare experts collaborate with customers to shape a vision for the future and bring it to life.
One platform can change everything. AvaSure’s Intelligent Virtual Care Platform combines continuous monitoring and episodic care solutions designed to free up more time for nursing and support staff, enable seamless remote care workflows, and ensure better outcomes for patients.
Including Virtual Nursing Best Practices from AvaSure’s Experienced Clinical Support Team
Hospitals across the U.S. are challenged with nursing shortages, a rise in patient complexity and unprecedented cost challenges. Nurses are being stretched too thin, constantly asked to do more with less. This environment is causing 52% of nurses to consider leaving the bedside at a time when labor is already a challenge. Hospital leadership is being forced to think differently about how technology can help create a new model of care delivery.
89% of hospital leaders say they’re considering some form of virtual nursing, but only 2% have implemented a program – why the gap? Many don’t know where to start.
Are you in the 2% that have already started their virtual nursing journey? We can help no matter what phase you’re at! Schedule a complementary on-site assessment to get started with AvaSure.
For those still concepting, with our extensive experience helping over 1,000 hospitals across the U.S. with their virtual sitting and virtual nursing programs – we’ve put together a 7-step roadmap for starting your virtual nursing program.
1. Identify your facilities unique pain points
It’s important to identify your biggest challenges within your organization. What’s unique about your facility and where should you focus efforts?
To help identify the top pain points, gather a group of cross-functional stakeholders including bedside staff. Ask them to provide feedback on what they are struggling with day-to-day.
Expect to hear things like:
Retirement vacancies causing a lack of highly experienced staff
Burnout & exhaustion of staff members of all types – from nurses to CNAs to physicians
Novice nurses feeling overwhelmed and unsure if they’re doing a good job
A rise in patient complexity
Quality metric declines across key areas
Patient throughput challenges & bottlenecks
Once you’ve cataloged what your staff is dealing with, you can get to prioritizing.
2. Prioritize the challenges with the greatest impact
Once you understand challenges across the facility, work to identify which is creating the biggest drain on the system.
We see two models of virtual nursing that customers are starting with first to address their top challenges – based on ease and the biggest impact:
Clinical Resource TeleNurse™ Model: a virtual nurse offloads documentation burden, giving bedside teams more time for direct, hands-on patient care
Admission & discharge support
Medication reconciliation
Patient & family education
2-nurse sign-off
Expert consultation
Expert Oversight TeleNurse™ Model: a virtual nurse oversees a cohort of complex patients providing clinical insight & nurse mentorship
Review & respond to clinical triggers from EHR and/or physiological monitoring
Expert nurses provide guidance and mentorship to novice nurses on the unit
Proactive patient rounding
Support satellite facilities with expert interventionists/specialists
We are confident one of these virtual nurse models would be a great place to start and to solve your greatest challenges.
3. Build your business case
Building a business case to sell your organization on starting a virtual nursing program is essential to ongoing success. The collaboration between clinical and IT leadership is key in this stage and to document how an IT infrastructure can help support clinical needs, not just today but for the future.
Once you’ve identified the model of virtual nursing with the most impact for your facility, begin to identify goals and benchmarks for your program.
Best practice from AvaSure’s clinical team: Be sure to include feedback from front line staff and managers, bringing them along in the process. Their buy in will be essential long-term. Make sure your care teams understand this program is designed to help them, not add more work to their plate or eliminate jobs.
4. Select a vendor partner
The final piece of your business case will be to choose a virtual care partner that can help you achieve your long-term goals. It’s important to select a partner that has both clinical & technical expertise and will help grow your program over time.
When evaluating vendors, be sure to consider:
Platform ease of use
Be sure to select a vendor that offers a platform that supports multiple clinical use cases that is easy for nurses to use.
Support
There is a lot of clinical change & workflow management when implementing a change to the care model, select a vendor with expertise who will partner with your clinical teams throughout this process.
IT teams also have a lot on their plates and shouldn’t be overburdened with implementing a new platform. Consider a vendor who provides robust technical support including project management and 24/7 support – not just at the time of deployment, but throughout the partnership.
Demonstrated outcomes
In any emerging area, a lot a new solutions will become available with little experience. In the clinical space, it’s more important than ever to select a partner with demonstrated experience in delivering outcomes for our patients.
Current technology
Vendor consolidation is key for maximizing the impact of current spend and reducing technology duplicity. Before adding a new vendor, consider if any current solutions – such as your TeleSitter® solution – also offer virtual nursing solutions before investing in additional technology.
5. Roll out your first use case
Now that you’ve identified the challenges, started formulating a business case with IT and have leadership on board it’s time to start building your program. You can start with a single unit or department if you’d like.
It’s good to start small, helping to demonstrate early success. Consider perhaps starting with peak hours – such as only between 9 a.m. – 9 p.m. to help ease staff into the program and staff the virtual team successfully.
But be flexible, consider that you may identify in real time that this isn’t the most impactful area to be addressed. Be willing to adapt and change quickly. It’s imperative that you get some quick wins under your belt to gain buy in from front line staff and garner continued support from leadership, so an agile approach can help.
When deciding what unit to start on, think about the following:
Highest churn unit for admission & discharges – may be a high need for offload of documentation
Unit with highest amount of novice nursing staff – may benefit from expert oversight & mentorship
Unit with highest percentage of travel nurses – may benefit from expert oversight or clinical resource
Considering using virtual nursing for specialists that low staffed – nutritionists, diabetic management, wound care, social workers/case managers & more
Assist with morning rounds on units with residents using virtual nurse to facilitate documentation to communicate with family
Units with high complexity patients allowing virtual nurse to do purposeful rounding being a second set of eyes on patients
In conjunction with units that have deterioration or sepsis protocols and/or wearable monitoring to help reduce false alarms and identify early signs of adverse events
Be sure to build in a feedback loop to hear directly from front line staff on how the program is going and have a way to share wins across the facility and with leadership. This positive word of mouth is what will really sell the program.
6. Share results with stakeholders and spread the word
After a few weeks or months, ensure you hold a forum with leadership and the cross functional teams involved in the early discussions to update them on your progress. Show how the pilot has driven change against your key goals or metrics. AvaSure’s clinical team will help you pull your data and showcase your progress.
Tip from AvaSure’s Customer Success Team: it’s important to have a baseline before starting so you can demonstrate change, be sure to log all metrics before implementation in addition to any financials.
Best practice from AvaSure’s clinical team: Include great catches & stories from front line leaders. While metric moving is great, it’s the stories that will win the hearts of your teams.
7. Scale up your program – you’re really doing it
Now that you’ve demonstrated success (and it was easy!) identify additional units to cover or consider expanding to a second model of virtual nursing. But be reasonable about what your team can take on at once. Go slowly & deliberately, making sure your teams have a venue to speak up if it’s too much.
Worried about staffing your virtual nurse program? Learn about hosted options if you don’t have adequate talent to pull from in your area.
A successful virtual nursing program can not only help with labor challenges, helping to optimize the productivity of your staff but it can also help to drive nurse satisfaction & retention. Nurses will feel more supported, get more time at the bedside, and leave feeling accomplished. AvaSure can help support you through every step of scoping, implementing, and scaling a virtual nursing program. With 15% of our staff being RNs, we understand the unique challenges of care systems today and have a robust clinical team to help from business case development through implementation, metric tracking, expansion.
Earlier this month, KLAS, a research and insights firm focused on improving healthcare, published its first-ever Emerging Solutions Top 20 report highlighting new solutions with the greatest potential to disrupt and improve healthcare. For the first time, KLAS asked 16 prominent members of the healthcare community with broad HIT expertise to read all current KLAS reports on emerging technology and rate their perception of the solutions based on their potential to impact healthcare’s Quadruple Aim of improved outcomes, reduced cost of care, improved patient experience and improved clinician experience.
AvaSure not only made the list, it was identified as the No. 1 solution for reducing healthcare costs.
As KLAS bases its performance reports on customer experience, we want to thank you for believing in AvaSure as a trusted partner, making it possible for us to achieve this recognition. We pride ourselves on providing a cost-efficient platform and a wrap-around clinical program to ensure you can navigate the perfect storm brewing in healthcare today.
This recognition shows that we are fulfilling our original mission of lower costs through fewer sitters, a more efficient and successful means of improving patient safety and quality of care.
We aim to do so much more.
Our current challenge is helping solve healthcare’s staffing crisis. AvaSure’s virtual care platform enables health systems to optimize and augment their labor force with a team of virtual monitors and RNs who support the bedside teams with tasks such as admission, discharge and patient education. This gives nurses peace of mind and more time for direct patient care.
