Once you’ve sold your teams on virtual nursing, picking the right partner is essential.
In this session, you’ll learn:
Criteria to use to select the right partner for program success & what requirements should guide your decision
How technology will impact your program and details around emerging trends towards AI/Machine Learning, camera-in-every-room, and more
This free, six-part series will take place the last Thursday of each month featuring Lisbeth along with special guests and experts. Lisbeth will cover key topics, lessons learned from ongoing programs, and audience questions.
Posted on June 15, 2023 by Jagmeet - Uncategorized
Caring for children in the inpatient setting presents unique challenges for hospitals across the nation. The situation is exacerbated by persistent staffing shortages and the concurrent mental health crisis amongst young Americans. Hear how nurse leaders at a children’s hospital and an acute-care hospital are using virtual sitting for pediatric and adolescent patients and have succeeded in reducing adverse events while also reducing stress on families and caregivers. This AONL Industry Insights webinar is presented by AvaSure.
AvaSure isn’t just for acute care anymore. Panelists will share the benefits and success of remote video monitoring in long term acute care hospital settings and skilled nursing facilities.
Presented by Essentia, Gaylord Specialty Healthcare
Read our white paper where peer-reviewed articles and presentations validate AvaSure TeleSitter’s success in improving safety, quality, and productivity outcomes.
Summary
In 2008, AvaSure devised a remote observation technology called the TeleSitter to help hospitals reduce the cost of using one-on-one sitters to avert patient harms. Fourteen years later, that application has evolved into a complete patient observation, communication and analytics solution that improves safety, productivity, and the experience of care. Avasure prizes its technological innovation, but what truly sets it apart is not the new hardware or software; it is evidence-based improvement.
Early on, AvaSure recognized the need for a clinical program to help hospitals and health system…
Provide your information to download the full white paper
Many leading healthcare organizations are turning to centralized audiovisual monitoring models as an alternative to 1:1 sitting for high-risk patients
Because one-to-one sitter staffing isn’t effective for high-risk patients, many leading healthcare organizations are turning to centralized audiovisual monitoring models as an alternative.
During a virtual featured session sponsored by AvaSure as part of Becker’s Hospital Review 11th Annual Meeting in May, two telemedicine leaders from New Orleans-based Ochsner Health joined AvaSure’s Chief Clinical Innovation Officer to discuss how a TeleSitter program in a hub and spoke format can deliver clinical and financial benefits to health systems.
Presenters:
Jennifer Humbert, MSN, RN, AVP of Telemedicine at Ochsner Health
Rachelle Longo, BSN, RN, AVP of Telemedicine Strategic Partnership Solutions at Ochsner Health
Lisbeth Votruba, MSN, RN, Chief Clinical Innovation Officer at AvaSure
According to Lisbeth Votruba, RN, Chief Clinical Officer AvaSure, recent studies show that 80 percent of hospitals are interested in virtual monitoring or virtual nursing, yet only 2 percent have fully implemented such programs.
At the Becker’s Hospital Review 7th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting, in a workshop sponsored by AvaSure, two healthcare leaders — Ms. Votruba and Matt Barr, Senior Clinical Systems architect at Corewell Health in Grand Rapids, Mich. — discussed innovative deployments of virtual care technology.
Three key takeaways were:
When deploying virtual care solutions, clinical and IT teams must work together closely. In 2018, nurse leaders at Spectrum Health begin to investigate whether virtual safety monitoring was superior to traditional one-to-one sitters for adult and pediatric inpatients. Clinical evidence supported the expanded use of virtual safety monitoring and the clinical team selected AvaSure as their preferred solution.At this point, the IT team got involved and raised questions related to scalability, security and more. “Because IT challenged clinical on their choice and did its own, redundant investigation, the duration of conception-to-go-live took 18 months. Much longer than it needed to be.” Mr. Barr said. Today, walls between clinical and IT have been broken down and the two teams have a more collaborative relationship.
Virtual patient monitoring is financially attractive and protects patients from harm. At the newly merged Beaumont Health Spectrum Health (BHSH System – now Corewell Health) monitoring staff serve as lifeguards for 12 to 16 patients at a time. “This is a great entry-level healthcare position,” Ms. Votruba said. If issues arise, such as a fall risk or signs of potential harm, the monitoring staff’s first action is to verbally engage with the patient. In an emergent situation, they can use an alarm to bring staff to the bedside. “Over the last rolling 12 months, Corewell Health has documented 53,000 near misses on falls,” Ms. Votruba noted. In addition, with volatile and potentially violent patients, remote sitters help keep staff out of harm’s way.Organizations have also used the AvaSure TeleSitter® Solution for “out of the box” applications, like conversing with lonely, elderly patients or monitoring pediatric patients for non-accidental trauma from family members.From a financial perspective, the return on investment associated with AvaSure is easy to demonstrate. Over 12 months, Corewell Health provided 660,000 hours of virtual patient monitoring at $2.39 per hour for the technology and FTEs to monitor it. Providing one-to-one sitters for the same hours would have cost $10 million, assuming sitters are paid $16 per hour.
Virtual care models are a promising solution for closing the experience gap among newly hired nurses. Not only are healthcare organizations grappling with nursing shortages, but those nurses currently in the job market are often less experienced. This is a challenge since many patients today have more complex conditions and behavioral health issues are on the rise in acute care settings.To address these issues, Corewell Health will be running a virtual nursing pilot. “Experienced nurses who were thinking about leaving the workforce have been recruited for this program,” Ms. Votruba said. “They will take virtual nurse roles, providing mentoring and support to novice nurses on the floor. The remote expert virtual nurses will also handle some admission and discharge documentation, as well as patient education that requires an RN license.” One virtual nurse and two novice nurses will cover 10 patients. Outcomes data will be collected related to patient flow, dismissal times and nurse turnover. “The evidence suggests that with this model, dismissal times can be shortened by 30 minutes,” Ms. Votruba said.
Looking ahead, the Corewell Health team is optimistic about virtual care and other technology solutions. “COVID changed everything and virtual became the norm,” Mr. Barr said. “One positive is that we brought IT and clinical leaders together and they learned to make decisions quickly. Trust has developed across the board.”
Firman, J., Cook, J., Bass, T., & Forrester, S., “Implementing a Virtualized Care Model for Inpatient Nursing”, American Organization for Nuring Leadership 2022 Conference, April, 2022.
