Posted on August 31, 2023 by Miranda - Uncategorized
Many hospitals are experiencing staffing shortages, leading to nurse burnout and an increase in adverse events. How can hospitals create a care system that reduces the need for 1:1 patient sitters while enabling nurses to stay focused on other core patient care duties?
In this webinar, you will hear firsthand from CHS about how they expanded their virtual sitting program to enhance patient safety, optimize resource utilization and reduce costs.
Presenters:
Lynn Simon, M.D., MBA, President of Healthcare Innovation and Chief Medical Officer, CHS
Pam Rudisill, DNP, RN, MSN, NEA-BC, FAAN, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, CHS
Join us for a transformative session as we conclude the captivating journey through our virtual nursing 101 classroom series. In this final installment, Lisbeth Votruba, MSN, RN, Chief Clinical Officer, will distill the invaluable insights and profound wisdom garnered over the past six months of sessions from pioneering virtual nursing programs.
In this webinar, Lisbeth will uncover:
The essential considerations surrounding traditional care paradigms
How to embark on an exploration of the dynamic co-caring model
How this paradigm shift can effectively address the pressing challenges of care quality, patient experience, and cost containment
Don’t miss this unparalleled opportunity to learn from the forefront of nursing innovation. Join us for an engaging session that promises to empower you with the knowledge and strategies to not only initiate change but to shape the future of nursing care. Secure your spot today and be a part of this transformative experience as we uncover the pathway to redefining healthcare through virtual nursing excellence.
Survey of AvaSure customers reveals that 100% would purchase virtual care platform again, 72% achieve outcomes in six months or less.
BELMONT, Mich., Aug. 23, 2023 — AvaSure, the market leader in acute virtual care and remote safety monitoring, announced today that a new report from KLAS revealed high customer satisfaction with the company’s virtual care platform. KLAS reported on AvaSure in September 2021, and the new report offers a second look at how the overall customer experience has improved over the last two years.
The Second Look Performance report, which is based on structured interviews with AvaSure customers, revealed that all interviewed customers are satisfied to highly satisfied, saying AvaSure has continued to improve and deliver on its product, and that every respondent would buy again.
Customers highlighted the AvaSure platform’s ability to deliver a noticeable improvement on patient-safety outcomes, reduce falls and fall-related injuries, decrease the number of sitters required, and catch patient complications earlier. 72% of surveyed customers told KLAS they achieve outcomes in six months or less and 36% achieve outcomes immediately.
Additionally, AvaSure’s platform received top marks from customers across a wide range of categories, including ease of use, quality of implementation, quality of training, integration approach, and delivering its money’s worth. 100% of AvaSure customers told KLAS they would purchase the virtual care platform again.
“We are proud to have earned top marks from KLAS again and would like to thank our customers for their partnership in improving patient safety while reducing staff workloads,” said Adam McMullin, CEO, AvaSure. “AvaSure provides the most clinically proven solution on the market and we are committed to helping our customers achieve a step function improvement in their results. Beyond industry-leading technology, AvaSure has a dedicated clinical team that partners with our customers and is even further ahead when it comes to clinical evidence of success in solving patient and staff safety and nursing resource challenges that health systems are facing today.”
AvaSure offers an innovative virtual care model that integrates virtual staff into current clinical workflows to enhance the work experience for bedside nurses and elevate the quality of patient care they deliver while also reducing labor costs.
AvaSure customer quotes from the KLAS report:
“AvaSure has done a really good job because they have made their hardware nimble enough to support not only virtual observation functions but also virtual nursing concepts. The vendor is making resources available for a variety of different services and applications.” — Vice President, August 2023
“AvaSure’s chief nursing officer drives research and is very interested in it. That is a really positive thing about the company because they are not just about the product. They are really trying to focus on patient safety and the outcomes. That is important. AvaSure should continue to drive things, especially as they are looking at their AI solution, pushing alerts to the staff, and integrating with EMRs that hospitals are using.” — Director, August 2023
“Our sitter hours have improved while using this solution. We have been able to compare the sitting hours to the camera hours. The reduction in fall rates at the hospitals is something we are tracking, and according to the literature, everybody who has used this tool has reported a reduction in falls. There is also a reduction in elopements and medical device interference.” —Director, August 2023
Additionally, customers noted that AvaSure’s strengths include:
Hardware is more versatile beyond virtual observation
Product research is focused on patient safety outcomes
Outcomes from the platform are clear and quickly realized
KLAS is a research organization that helps healthcare providers make informed technology decisions by offering impartial vendor performance information.
AvaSure can be used for more than preventing patient falls. Download a new AvaSure white paper on virtual monitoring for low-to-moderate suicide risk patients.
About AvaSure
AvaSure provides the leading hospital virtual care platform to systems with nursing and staffing shortages that are challenged to significantly reduce labor costs without sacrificing patient health outcomes. Recognized by KLAS Research as the leader in reducing the cost of patient care, AvaSure is the pioneer in providing best-in-class, video-based AvaSure TeleSitter® and TeleNurse™ solutions. As a trusted partner of more than 1,000 hospitals, AvaSure combines remote patient monitors, virtual nurses and other providers on a single platform to enhance clinical care without placing any additional burdens on existing staff. To learn more about AvaSure visit www.avasure.com.
Discover how virtual monitoring for low-to-moderate suicide risk patients can help.
The increasing prevalence of mental health conditions demands innovative approaches to ensure patient safety. Traditional methods like costly 1:1 sitters are unsustainable in the face of labor shortages.
Over 45% of AvaSure’s clients across the country are embracing virtual sitting for low-to-moderate suicide risk patients, and the results speak for themselves. Increased staff satisfaction, decreased 1:1 sitter costs, and better patient outcomes are just a few of the advantages of implementing the TeleSitter solution.
Download our latest use case spotlight to access valuable evidence and proven strategies for virtual sitting for low-to-moderate suicide risk patients.
This model of virtual nursing focuses on retaining an experienced nurse to oversee a cohort of complex patients, monitoring for early signs of adverse patient events, mentoring novice nurses and providing support to bedside care teams.
Hear from Lisbeth Votruba, RN, MSN, CCO of AvaSure and the team from UCHealth, Amy Hassell, RN, MSN, Director of Patient Services and Dr. Hemali Patel, ACMO of Inpatient Services. Amy and Dr. Patel work in the innovative Virtual Care Center at UCHealth which helps to support monitoring for patient deterioration, post rapid-response monitoring and more using the Expert Oversight model of Virtual Nursing. Hear about how their program started, outcomes they’ve experienced over the past year and roadblocks they’ve faced in scaling their virtual nursing efforts.
In this session, you’ll learn:
What’s driving the need for this nursing model, areas of focus and hear best practices from those who’ve already piloted.
Early outcomes from those already using this model to help detect adverse events sooner and drive satisfaction in nursing staff, especially novice team members.
Tips on staffing and scaling your virtual nursing program
Presenters: Amy Hassell RN, MSN, Senior Director of Patient Services, UCHealth Virtual Health Center Dr. Hemali Patel, MD, ACMO, Inpatient Services, UCHealth
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.
CIO’s and IT departments in health systems across the U.S. are charting the course towards a camera in every room, but how to get there isn’t as easy as it seems. Many think a camera is just a camera – and that off-the-shelf hardware will help them achieve their clinical goals. But AvaSure has learned from our 15+ years of experience in virtual care, that installing a camera is only one part of building a successful monitoring program.
Hear from the AvaSure Chief Technology Officer, Toby Eadelman, who helped build the AvaSure platform, and Clinical Implementation Manager, Wendy Pompa-Breen, RN, who helps customers build successful virtual care programs every day, on best practices for standing up a virtual care program that is results-oriented and outcome driven.
Learn how to lay the foundation today, for a successful camera-in-every-room program tomorrow. In this webinar you will:
Hear from industry leaders on what 1,000+ hospitals have tried, failed or succeed at along their virtual care journey
Learn best practices in developing the workflow management, policy & procedures and implementation guidelines necessary to gain clinical buy-in and support from front-line staff
Learn from our CTO why the AvaSure platform is different – making it an effective and efficient clinical tool, from its ability to function in any room to its ability to easily integrate with your EHR.
Some recent staffing survey results should be scary to health system leaders. A virtual nursing expert discusses the value of two emerging tele-nurse models, and how provider organizations can get started with them.
Virtual nursing has been getting an increasing amount of attention in healthcare, especially with telemedicine entering the mainstream during and following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Toby Eadelman is chief technology officer at AvaSure, a virtual care technology and services company that works in virtual nursing. AvaSure has six virtual nursing implementations underway.
Eadelman attended HIMSS23 in April and said there was a lot of curiosity among attendees he talked with about virtual nursing. Hospital leaders told him they’re considering some form of virtual nursing but have not actually started a program because they don’t know where to begin.
Healthcare IT News spoke with Eadelman to discuss the state of virtual nursing and how healthcare provider organizations can benefit from these programs.
Q. You attended the HIMSS23 in April. What did you hear at the show about virtual nursing?
A. There was a lot of curiosity among health system and hospital leaders about virtual nursing. On more than one occasion, hospital leaders told me they were considering launching a virtual nursing program in some form but were unsure of where to begin.
The reasons behind this interest and curiosity are familiar to anyone who follows the healthcare industry – rapidly escalating labor costs and widespread staffing shortages.
For instance, according to a recent national survey of nurses, 100,000 nurses quit their jobs during the pandemic, and by 2027, nearly 900,000, or almost one-fifth of the 4.5 million registered nurses nationwide, plan to do the same, endangering the overall national healthcare system if no action is taken.
Both nurses themselves and hospital leaders understand the current approach to nursing is not sustainable, so they are looking to virtual nursing solutions to solve the problem.
Q. You say you’ve been seeing two models of virtual nursing emerging. The first model you call the “expert oversight tele-nurse.” Please describe how this works in-person and virtually.
A. In general, hospitals begin their journey into virtual nursing by employing one of the two primary models that have developed across the healthcare industry. One of those virtual nursing models is what we call the expert oversight tele-nurse model. In this approach, virtual nurses focus on overseeing higher-acuity patients for potential deterioration triggers, supporting novice nurses, and conducting virtual rounding.
An example of a hospital that has implemented this model is Colorado-based UCHealth, which reduced emergency “code blues” by 70% after implementing a virtual nursing program that improved detection of patients experiencing deterioration.
UCHealth has found that virtual nurses can observe changes in patients’ health status, just as they would if they were in rooms with patients, which has helped reduce phone calls and bedside interruptions for in-hospital nurses.
Separately, one hospital in the Southeastern U.S. has launched a virtual nursing program to decrease holding times in the emergency department by streamlining admissions from the ED to inpatient beds. Hospital leaders view this program as a means of supporting nurses on the frontlines without compromising patient safety or patient experience.
Q. The second model you call the “clinical resource tele-nurse.” Please describe how this works in-person and virtually.
A. The second model of virtual nursing, called the clinical resource tele-nurse model, is focused on using virtual clinicians for admission and discharge support, patient and family education, consults, and more. This model supports episodic intervention with two-way audio-video technology allowing personal interaction with the patient during important care events.
After having successfully implemented a virtual sitting program in 2020 in its medical surgical and intensive units, a hospital in the Southeast has launched a pilot virtual nursing program to decrease ED holding times by streamlining admission from the emergency department to inpatient beds.
The medical center sees this as a way to support nurses on the frontlines without compromising patient safety or patient experience.
Q. Where should healthcare provider organization health IT leaders interested in virtual nursing begin the process of starting a program?
A. The first step to starting a virtual nursing program is to identify the biggest challenges that are confronting the provider organization. Doing so will provide insights about unique pain points and clues about how to relieve them.
Gather a group of cross-functional stakeholders, including bedside staff, and listen to them describe the problems they encounter, which are likely to include challenges such as burnout and exhaustion, patient throughput bottlenecks, rising patient complexity, and retirement vacancies causing a lack of highly experienced staff.
Next, prioritize the challenges by greatest impact, build a compelling business case to health system executives about how virtual nursing will lead to financial and operational improvements, and select the right vendor partner.
To ensure success, do not attempt to DIY this. Partner with an experienced virtual care company that offers a system with very high uptime and very good audio and video quality. Ideally, a vendor with experience providing video and audio in the acute care space, for example, a tele-sitting company, and be sure they also have exceptional 24/7/365 customer care.
The ideal virtual care platform enables virtual team care by combining remote patient sitters, virtual nurses, and other providers in a single enterprise technology solution to enhance clinical care without placing any additional burdens on existing staff.
Once you’ve selected a tech partner, it’s time to select the first use case.
For a virtual nursing program’s first use case, it is advisable to start small to demonstrate early success. For example, consider launching in a single unit or department. After rolling out the first use case, spread the word about the virtual nursing program’s positive impact on staff and patients.
Are you looking at your virtual care strategy? The easiest place to start is refreshing the systems you already have. Learn from AvaSure experts how to incorporate the latest technologies into your virtual care program. You won’t want to miss this session discussing how you can protect patient safety, manage costs effectively, and why leveraging available resources, like AvaSure’s nurse experts, is more critical than ever.
In this webinar, you’ll learn:
Key considerations and tips when planning your virtual care strategy
How AvaSure’s devices and software can support your program goals
Trade in options to help you save while taking advantage of the latest technology
How refreshing your program drives nurse satisfaction and patient safety
There’s no telling what type of illness surges hospitals will see this year: Take lessons from Jefferson Health’s nurse-led virtual nursing pilot program here.
A surge in respiratory viruses over the fall and winter months placed immense capacity and resource strain on hospitals. This year, they can’t afford to wait and see what the next respiratory virus reason might bring.
In this session, leaders from Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health will share how a nurse-led approach helped the organization meet staffing demands during this past pediatric surge in respiratory syncytial virus cases. Colleen Mallozzi, RN, senior vice president and chief nursing informatics officer at Jefferson Health, and Laura Gartner, DNP, RN, clinical informatics director at the health system, will share how the team quickly expanded an existing virtual sitting program into a virtual nursing pilot to meet patient care and staffing demands.
Learning points:
The timely implementation of a systemwide virtual nursing pilot
The CNIO’s pivotal role in ensuring the clinical practice leads the technology and not the other way around
Critical steps to structure the program including the right setting, staffing, and outcome measurements
Presenters:
Colleen Mallozzi, MBA RN, SVP, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, Jefferson Health
Laura Gartner DNP, MS, RN, NEA-BC, Division Director Clinical Informatics, Jefferson Health
