Transforming the Industry: Day 2 of the AvaSure Virtual Symposium 2022

After an energizing first day, we’re back with another afternoon of fantastic content to share with you. As Gerry Lewis said during our closing fireside chat, in today’s environment clinicians and IT teams have a responsibility to work together to, “Create an end-to-end ecosystem that leverages enhanced clinical process and integrations, so we aren’t overburdening our clinical staff from a cognitive and burnout standpoint – otherwise, we are going to be challenged to take care of those in need in our communities.” Our role in helping to provide elevated patient care while liberating the bedside nurse has never been more important than in the midst of current staffing crisis.  

Today, we focused on Change Agents: Creating Awareness, Confidence and Excitement when rolling out a new care model inclusive of AvaSure TeleSitter and TeleNurse programs. We discussed obstacles to overcome, best practices for implementation and keys ways to share results with leadership. Then, we spoke with systems that have scaled to hub and spoke model systems – increasing their coverage through a centralized monitoring model. Ending the day, AvaSure CEO Adam McMullin sat down with Gerry Lewis, former CIO/EVP of Ascension to discuss the role of technology in the future of healthcare – exploring how to drive change at a health system, advice for expanding your virtual care program and how clinical leaders can best partner with their IT teams.   

Let’s look at some of the key findings from today: 

Change Agents: Creating Awareness, Confidence and Excitement

Presenters:

• Shannon Robertson, BSN, RN, Unit Director, Virtual Care Operations, Carilion Clinic Park View
• Jason Crouch, Virtual Care Operations Manager, Carilion Clinic Park View
• Meg Alexander-Patton, RN, BSN, Carilion Clinic Park View
  • No one is going to be a bigger advocate for your program than you are! You need to sell the value of your program – to leadership, to staff – for it to be successful. Meet with teams at all levels, explain the service and benefits to drive utilization. 
  • Change doesn’t end – it’s constant. If you don’t keep yourself on the front of people’s mind, they may forget you. Keep pushing to find new and innovative ways for devices to be used to continue pushing value of the program higher. 
  • Trust is the biggest key to success. Leadership and bedside staff need to trust that the monitor staff isn’t just “watching a camera” but adding value. You can demonstrate this with great catches, with shadowing programs and with communication.  
  • Listen to your staff – try to understand potential pain points, make them feel heard and important. Also make sure stakeholders have skin in the game, including these stakeholders in the process helps drive the best outcomes ensuring they have reasons to help drive the program forward. 
  • Best practice: do shadowing as part of interview process so that monitor techs can truly get a feel for what their job will be like before accepting the role, this helps them grasp the reality of the role and drive retention 

Centralized Monitoring: Optimizing Labor Across an Entire Health System 

Presenters:

• Mark Quirin, MSN, RN, Regional Manager for Virtual Monitoring Loyola Medicine
• Katherine Mitchell, BS, BSN, RN, CMU/VMU Nurse Manager, Baptist Health Medicine
• Kahlia King, CARE, Assistant Nurse Manager, Cox Health
  • Think about time zones being served and having an adequate hiring pool when picking a hub location.
  • As best you can, standardize data collection and routines across spokes being served by your hub to ensure consistency 
  • Involve more stakeholders up front – think beyond just clinical teams when starting your program and include case management, social work, security, financial leadership and more 
  • Consider a steering committee to help drive policy and procedure implementation but also to have people not in the “day to day” provide a wide-angle lens on your program 

Best practices for creating an engaged and effective monitor staff: 

• Consider flexibility in scheduling – 12-hour shifts may make sense for nursing but not for monitor techs sitting at a desk, consider breaking them down or allowing for regular breaks to ensure they’re engaged when monitoring 
• Use sit-to-stand desks to give monitors a way to change up their workspace. Want to take it one step further? One panelist has treadmill desks, stationary bikes and more! 
• If you’re in an office environment, consider ‘theme days’ – like potlucks, pajama days, karaoke parties and more! 
• Focus on recognition: use a ‘wow wall’, kudos system, newsletters, or emails to share great catches and recognize your monitor staff 

Fireside Chat with Gerry Lewis, Former CIO/EVP of Ascension and Adam McMullin, CEO AvaSure: How Technology Plays a Role in the Future of Healthcare 

• Three things to consider when trying to drive change at a health system (if you can meet 2-3 of these, we should be taking next steps in how we operationalize this):
  • Does this differentiate the patient or clinical experience? 
  • Does this help us improve the value of the services we provide? Can we provide better services and be more efficient in how we deploy them? 
  • Is there an opportunity to bend the cost curve? 
• The key to project success: clinically led but technically enabled – if that partnership isn’t there it’s very difficult
  • When working together with clinicians and IT teams – the more we create relationship and trust, break big complex processes down and continuously iterate we will be more successful. We like to go after these big bang projects where we expect everything to be perfect instead of starting with the first 20% and iterating until we feel like we’ve met all the clinical needs
• We are at an inflection point; skilled care labor shortages have put us there. We need to look at how we apply labor and technology differently. We need to look at models, processes, technology and people in a very different way because the fundamentals are going to be challenged. 

Thank you to all who joined us for an exciting two days of sharing stories, learnings and experiences together.