Falls remain a persistent and costly issue among hospitalized veterans, who are at a higher risk due to more prevalent chronic conditions. In response, the Veterans Health Administration introduced the SAFE STEPS for Veterans Act in 2024, creating an Office of Falls Prevention. 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.
To reduce the need for 1:1 sitters and improve safety, AvaSure’s AI-powered virtual care platform enables hospitals to remotely monitor high-risk patients and prevent falls and other adverses events.
Download the guide to learn:
How to reduce falls by nearly 20%
Ways to improve staff efficiency & satisfaction
The top 4 adverse events prevented in VA hospitals
Recent advances in AI bring exciting promise to the healthcare industry, from augmenting the work of clinical staff to improving research and treatment across the globe. In the virtual care world, AI is transforming virtual sitting and telehealth through computer vision.
Computer vision, a type of AI that hospitals use to help monitor patients and their surroundings, can vastly improve patient and staff safety. It remotely identifies behavior, risk indicators, and other patterns in real-time, then triggers an alert to on-site staff to take action. Clinical teams are using it to augment virtual sitting and make fast, informed decisions that lead to better outcomes.
Download the guide to learn:
How to combat staff shortages and better support your clinical team with AI-driven virtual care
How computer vision improves virtual monitoring and lowers the risk of patient falls, elopement, and other negative incidents
How to think about healthcare privacy and compliance in an AI world
The top three AI use cases for forward-looking CIOs
Hospital CIOs need technology partners that can significantly reduce administrative burden on clinical staff, lower costs and improve patient outcomes by integrating virtual care technology. Many health systems are implementing virtual care platforms for use-cases such as admissions, discharge, specialty consults, and virtual rounding. Virtual care is more than video calls; it combines in-person and remote treatment and requires scalable, enterprise-wide technology that doesn’t create a burden on IT resources.
Find out how AvaSure, the leader in Virtual Care with over 1,100 customers, can help you move from virtual sitting to a true end to end virtual care strategy.
Implementing virtual care comes with a unique set of challenges. Hospitals must find a way to provide quality virtual services while controlling the cost of the technology that supports them – a difficult task when leadership is already under pressure to tighten their budgets.
Download the blueprint to learn:
Top 3 use cases for a virtual care platform
CIO’s checklist for choosing a virtual care vendor
The virtual care adoption model for a successful rollout
Join 1,100+ hospitals across the US in ushering in the future of virtual care.
In the face of nursing shortages and escalating patient acuity, healthcare is in a perfect storm. Nurses are burdened with increasing demands and 52% are contemplating leaving the bedside. This environment is forcing hospital leadership to think differently about how technology can help create a new model of care delivery.
Virtual Nursing offers an augmented care environment where a virtual team supports bedside nurses and elevates hands-on patient care. AvaSure’s virtual care platform can assist staff with:
Assistance with documentation
Specialty consults
Sepsis and deterioration detection/prevention
Novice nurse mentoring
Download the use case study to learn how this model of care can help your health system reduce labor costs and support bedside nurses.
Posted on February 19, 2024 by Holly Martin - Uncategorized
While many may associate virtual monitoring/virtual sitting with falls risk patients, there are a number of ways that the use of Virtual Safety Attendants (VSAs) and video-based monitoring technology can positively impact pediatric patients. Increasing in importance as hospitals across the nation and being exacerbated by persistent staffing shortages and the concurrent mental health crisis amongst young Americans.
The most prevalent use cases for virtual sitting in the pediatric space include:
Low-Moderate Suicide Risk
According to a JAMA editorial, suicide is up by 69.5% for children and adolescents making it essential to have solutions in place for monitoring these patients.
Eating Disorders
While supervision is generally considered an essential element of caring for hospitalized patients with eating disorders, it is costly, reduces staff availability for the care of other patients, and can be a barrier for patients.
Substance Abuse
Children that suffer from either intentional drug exposure due to substance abuse or, as is a rising trend due to the legalization of marijuana in many states, unintentional drug exposure are typically candidates for 1:1 monitoring during a portion of their stay.
Mom/Baby
While falls in the most thought of sense may not be a risk in pediatric populations, infant falls are a severely under-reported adverse event that can be costly and add to the patient’s length of stay. Often occurring when a parent falls asleep while holding the newborn, dropping the neonate to the floor, an infant fall can occur during transfer of the child from one person to another, by a family member or a slip and fall of family or staff.
Workplace Violence Prevention
Health care workers are 4 times more likely to suffer violence than workers in other industries. Prevention in the pediatric setting can be especially challenging as patients with behavioral tendencies for physical violence (i.e. hitting and biting) may not be identified prior to admission.
Child Protective Use Cases
Non-Accidental Trauma: When there is a concern with the family member, or visitors, behavior that raises a safety concern for a child, it can also present a safety concern for a 1:1 sitter assigned to be in the room.
No Family at Bedside: When children are very ill, parents are not always able to spend time at their bedside due to work commitments and caring for other children, which can create a sense of distress.
Medical Device Interference
Certain devices including IVs, catheters, drains and tubes have placement that is essential to the health, recovery and well-being of the pediatric patient. Virtual Sitting can be useful in keeping extra eyes on these patients, notifying caregivers on the floor if the child is pulling at, twisting or attempting to intentionally or non-intentionally remove the device.
Used in various settings: Emergency Department, Pediatric Units, NICU, PICU, Pediatric Hospitals
Posted on February 5, 2024 by Jagmeet - Uncategorized
Healthcare workers are 5x more likely to experience workplace violence; new strategies are necessary to keep staff safe.
Workplace violence in hospitals is not an isolated incident, and the impact reverberates throughout the organization, affecting morale, job satisfaction, and ultimately, patient outcomes. Forty-eight percent of nurses reported an increase in workplace violence in 2022 and 80% of sitters report experiencing violence. It’s time to invest in new ways to protect healthcare’s greatest resource.
Hospitals using the TeleSitter® solution to prevent workplace violence have increased by 107% since 2019. With 24/7 monitoring to keep 1:1 sitters out of harms way and immediate intervention alarms, virtual sitting has emerged as a proven method to reduce workplace violence.
Download the use case spotlight to learn new strategies and methods to keep your staff safe.
In a time where staffing shortages are impacting patient safety, virtual sitting continues to be a proven alternative to 1:1 sitters.
It’s no secret that staffing shortages are having a significant impact on patient safety, particularly when it comes to preventing falls.
Hospitals across the nation have experienced dramatic improvements in fall and 1:1 sitter reduction by adopting the TeleSitter® solution. For example, Community Health Systems (CHS) achieved a remarkable 76% decrease in falls. Similarly, the VA North Texas reduced sitting costs by nearly 90%. These success stories are just a few bright lights among AvaSure’s successful customers.
Over the past decade, nursing research has not only established the feasibility and safety of virtual sitting but has also illuminated its superiority in achieving patient safety outcomes when compared to traditional one-to-one sitting.
Download the latest use case spotlight to take the first step towards patient safety.
In the transformative world of healthcare right now, one topic is at the center of all the headlines: the critical nursing shortage. This gap of over 1 million nurses nationwide is the culmination of years of declining nurse enrollment amplified by the pandemic. As hospitals must function with fewer RNs without sacrificing quality care, the use of virtual care has emerged as a potential savior to a dire situation.
Hospitals across the U.S. are dipping their toes into the world of virtual nursing, but many are unsure where to start and not making much progress. Yet Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth has been in the virtual care game for years and can be viewed as a roadmap for other facilities looking to cope with capacity challenges, staffing shortages, and extended emergency department wait times.
Download the whitepaper to learn:
Concrete strategies and starting points for implementing virtual care with an adoption model based approach
How virtual nursing can improve employee retention and patient outcomes
Real-world results from a successful virtual nursing program
Please fill out the form to download the whitepaper.
AvaSure has developed and integrated AI enhancements to our pioneering TeleSitter® solution that identify patients at risk, reduce cognitive burden on virtual staff and help prevent adverse events
We are creating a future where cutting edge technology and compassionate care converge. AI is essential in that future, but it must be deployed thoughtfully with the clinician and patient in mind. We set high standards for safety and alert fatigue in developing our AI enhancements, choosing to partner with leading vendors where best-in-class capabilities already exist and developing others with internal expertise.
Download the latest guide to learn more about our TeleSitter solution AI enhancements.