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.
BELMONT, Mich., May 31, 2023 — AvaSure, the inventor of the TeleSitter® solution and the market leader in acute virtual care and remote safety monitoring, announced today that it is launching artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements to its industry-leading virtual care platform. AI augmentation will enable health system partners to enhance efficiency and time-savings while also improving the quality of care they deliver.
AvaSure unveils computer-vision augmented alerts for patient falls and elopement
Initial applications will build on the already strong ROI delivered via the AvaSure TeleSitter solution by amplifying a virtual safety attendant’s capacity for reducing elopement and preventing falls. Safety attendants will remain the “human in the loop” with support from AI, which will alert virtual safety attendants when an at-risk patient tries to stand up or attempts to leave their room. Virtual team members can then intervene before an adverse event occurs.
“AvaSure is the most trusted video-based partner in healthcare because of our well-earned reputation for providing only human-validated alarms with response times measured in seconds,” said Adam McMullin, CEO, AvaSure. ”Accuracy is our goal, and AvaSure will use AI technology in a meaningful way to support that goal.”
AvaSure is working toward AI augmented implementations with several health system clients and is now seeking a set number of additional collaborators for a limited release.
Kinometrix partnership adds predictive fall risk identification
In addition, AvaSure is excited to partner with Kinometrix to better identify patients at risk of falling who would benefit from participation in AvaSure’s TeleSitter program. Kinometrix expertly employs predictive analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence with Electronic Health Records – effectively mining data related to potential inpatient falls. These AI-driven enhancements will improve the accuracy of identifying patients at risk of falling and alleviate the nursing workload associated with fall risk assessments. Opportunities to pilot this solution are now available to all health system clients.
AvaSure’s 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.
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. Recently 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.
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
Join AvaSure Chief Clinical Officer, Lisbeth Votruba, MSN, RN, for Session 2! In this on-demand webinar, you’ll learn:
How the Clinical Resource TeleNurse focuses on offloading documentation and administrative burden from bedside teams, helping to optimize your labor force and deliver elevated patient care
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 reduce discharge time, increase patient & staff satisfaction and optimize outcomes
Join AvaSure Chief Clinical Officer, Lisbeth Votruba, MSN, RN, as we kick off a six-part classroom series: Virtual Nursing 101. Lisbeth had a special guest Terri Hinkley, CEO of the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses on this first webinar to discuss the important role of the virtual nurse and the creation of the MSNCB Role Certification. The two task force members of the certification dived into key competencies to look for when hiring a virtual nurse and how to recruit for this role without taking away from bedside staff or further exacerbating staffing challenges.
U.S. nurses have relied on the same technology, the nurse call light, to care for a growing, aging, more demanding patient population
It’s time for a more interactive patient room
The truth is that the call light technology used in thousands of patient rooms is rarely updated and increasingly deficient in detecting and alerting staff to life-threatening scenarios.
Amazing advancements like virtual visits, patient portals and remote patient monitoring for disease management are improving communication and quality of care. But how about technology that optimizes inpatient and caregiver safety against violence and “sentinel”[1] or patient safety events?
It’s time to overhaul the call light.
As AI, virtual care, and telehealth take center stage in healthcare delivery, there is an opportunity to embrace a more interactive patient room where:
Patients are protected from self-harm and adverse events in real time
Clinicians and caregivers can safely and effectively interact with patients before events escalate
The spread of viruses like COVID-19 is mitigated
The care team is reserved for the highest, most effective level of bedside care
Call lights, unsecured mobile devices (think baby monitors), and the questionable practice of using 1:1 sitters placed with patients presenting infectious disease or violent tendencies are neither safe nor sustainable ways to improve patient safety, experience or outcomes. As healthcare workers sometimes feel compelled to adapt unsecure workarounds to monitor potentially dangerous scenarios, it is imperative that health systems consider secure technology for optimal care and safety for every patient and every caregiver.
Thankfully, this is not a futurist mindset. A solution – remote inpatient video monitoring – does exist in most major hospitals around the country. Has it made its way into your holistic telehealth strategy?
What exactly is remote safety monitoring?
Remote safety monitoring technology provides a continuous live feed from a patient’s room, allowing hospital staff to monitor a patient while reducing exposure risks to infectious disease or violence. It improves communication, provides peace of mind and reduces stress among caregivers, patients and families. It allows healthcare workers to keep an eye on patients who are at risk or in isolation and enables clinicians to communicate with their patients any time, remotely, from a monitor at the nursing station.
Remote video monitoring, in conjunction with other safety measures, can:
Help monitoring staff prevent falls, self-harm attempts, and manage other adverse events, such as elopement or wandering and interfering with medical devices.
Alert nursing staff to potentially abusive visitors
Help staff immediately identify clinical deterioration and notify nurses
Protect bedside staff from potentially violent patients
Enable remote monitoring staff to calm the most vulnerable patients
In addition, a paper[2] published in the Journal of Nursing Measurement shared a more personal benefit of the technology, in which a dying, nonverbal patient began humming along with a TeleSitter monitor who initiated humming the song the patient’s daughter hummed every time she visited, pre-COVID. This touching gesture created calm and familiarity in this patient’s final days.
A Holistic Telehealth Strategy Can Address Staffing Shortages, Hospital Falls, and Isolation
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing shortages, patient falls and patient violence were trending concerns in healthcare. Healthcare workers are four times more likely to suffer violence than workers in other industries.[3] These issues have been exacerbated in healthcare environments where staffing is limited, infectious disease management is critical, and at-risk inpatients continue to be isolated due to tighter visitor restrictions. AvaSure’s TeleSitter® Solution has been deployed in 75 percent of major health systems in 48 states. The secured audiovisual monitoring technology allows one tech to monitor up to 16 patients at a time. In an over-burdened health system – the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic notwithstanding – we must consider telehealth technology that protects the patient and the caregiver in today’s precarious healthcare environment. And technology that allows a nurse to serve at their highest calling can only elevate the nursing profession, improve staff engagement and, ultimately, optimize each patient’s recovery.
As chief clinical innovation officer of AvaSure, Lisbeth Votruba, MSN, RN, demonstrates her vision for innovative inpatient telehealth care delivery through her compassionate leadership, activism for the nursing profession, and advocacy for the dignity, safety and quality of care for patients, families and healthcare professionals. As a third-generation nurse, she understands how important it is to keep patients and frontline medical workers safe in clinical environments.
A few years ago, it was estimated that by 2030 the U.S. would experience a shortfall of more than half a million nurses, with a huge loss in quality and availability of care.
The pandemic sped up the timeline.
The greatest concern was the potential loss of specialized expertise; two-thirds of 6,000 critical care nurses surveyed in August 2021 said they were considering leaving the field from burnout.
Solutions have been hard to find, but Houston’s Memorial Hermann Health System has tried something new:
As the COVID-19 delta variant spread, critical care nurses were detailed to an existing central video monitoring facility. There, these “virtual nurses” can care for COVID-19 patients across the system, supporting less experienced bedside nurses and improving patient quality and safety.
Key learning objectives of this on-demand webinar:
Discover the basics of virtual care, including the technology and the art of video and audio interactions with patients and bedside staff
Learn about policies and workflows Memorial Hermann established for virtual nursing
Find out how virtual nurses can make the highest use of specialized care resources
Presenters:
Scott Shaver, MSN, LP, RN, CPHIMS, Director of Hospital Information Systems, Memorial Hermann
Mary Ellen Carrillo, MSN, MBA, RN, CVRN, FABC, Chief Nursing Officer, Vice President of Nursing, Memorial Hermann
Jennifer McGuire, Manager, Staffing, Memorial Hermann
