< + > Keys to Success with Virtual Nursing

Everyone knows we can never get enough nurses.  While we’d love to have more and should make more efforts to have and retain more nurses, I think that most organizations also realize that they’re going to have to be creative and leverage technology to be able to better utilize the nurses they have in their organization.  One of the most successful approaches to address this challenge is virtual nursing.

In a recent session at the HIMSS conference, Kevin Ehemann, Telehealth Account Manager at Baptist Health, Danny Kennedy, Corporate Director of Care Innovation at Baptist Health, Arkansas, and Angela Wilgus, Manager, Virtual Nursing at Baptist Health, Arkansas, shared more about their journey to bring multi-site virtual nursing from Caregility to their organization.  In the session they shared some of their learnings and how they had to align clinical and IT to make it a success.

Below you’ll find some of the keys to success that we captured during the session along with some additional commentary.

One of the common threads I’ve been hearing from CIOs lately is that there are no projects that are IT projects anymore.  Every project a CIO is leading requires involvement from the clinical team along with IT.  This aligns with Baptist Health’s experience with virtual nursing and the need to bring both teams together to make it a success.

This is a great takeaway from their experience.  I think we all like convenience and dragging a cart around is not convenient.  I did see a humanoid robot that could do telehealth at HIMSS, so maybe that will be the future.  Until that fully arrives, it seems like pulling around a cart for telehealth is friction a nurse doesn’t need.

It makes a lot of sense why you’d want a seasoned nurse to be doing your virtual nursing.  They’ve likely seen most of the situations that you’ll encounter and so they can be helpful across a wide variety of situations.  I’ve also heard a number of nurses say that virtual nursing extended their career a number of years.  Their bodies couldn’t handle the rigors of walking around like they used to do.  Virtual nursing provided them an alternative that leveraged their skills without the same physical rigor of being on the floor.

Like most change, it takes time to build trust in something.  Having the virtual nurse call the units each day was a creative way to build trust and consistency.  Building those relationships really is key.  Otherwise, the nurses on the floor won’t trust the virtual nurses.

Fascinating to see that the initial virtual nursing efforts led to a full Virtual Care Center.  I imagine building a full Virtual Care Center showed the staff that the organization was committed to virtual nursing.  The move to consistent hours likely helped to build trust in the process as well.  I’d like to learn more about how they’re integrating the virtual observation and virtual nursing efforts.  I imagine it’s a bit like a call center where it’s nice to have people who can float between different areas.  Having nurses who can do virtual observation and virtual nursing likely provides some staffing flexibility as demand for these services changes day by day.

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about the value of in-room cameras.  My guess is that this will become pretty standard in most hospital exam rooms.  Partially because the cost to put a camera in a room has gotten much cheaper, but also because being able to connect with the patient almost instantly is valuable for nurses, doctors, allied staff, and even the patients’ loved ones.

In this case, having the in-room camera is great for the virtual nurse who can easily connect with the patient and do the admission or discharge without help from the nurses on the floor.

The proof is always in the pudding as they say.  Amazing to see that the virtual care center was able to provide 60 hours back to nursing per day.  It’s interesting to hear that the documentation improved which likely has really nice downstream effects on things like revenue cycle management.  Plus, they had lower vacancy rates.  Harder to measure is the reduced administrative burden on the nursing staff that frees them up to focus more on patient care.

It’s amazing to see that Baptist Health was able to grow their patient encounters so quickly.  Normally a shift like this would take more time, but credit goes to their leadership for creating a great workflow that worked and for getting buy-in from staff for the effort.

Like often happens with successful IT projects, they were able to expand to many different departments.  I call it department jealousy.  It’s a powerful thing when one department sees another one use technology successfully, then they want to do it as well.  Seems like this is what happened with the virtual care programs at Baptist Health.

We’ve been seeing this trend happen over a number of years.  While TVs are great for entertainment in a hospital, the TVs are now connected and can be used for a wide variety of things beyond entertainment.  It’s nice to see them using the TVs as part of their virtual nursing effort including admission and discharge.

This is a great lesson learned.  Often we’re trying to fit technology into old buildings that weren’t designed for this technology.  There’s a lot to think about when doing so and may require some construction to do it right.  These little nuances really matter and often aren’t discovered until you start to implement the technology in the rooms.

This case study is a great example of the benefits of virtual nursing solutions from Caregility implemented at Baptist Health.  What I love about this project is that it continued to evolve and improve over time.  They applied the lessons learned and improved their approach as things progressed.  Now they have a full virtual care center they can build off of as they build even more virtual care functions into the future.

What do you think of these virtual nursing efforts?  What else have you learned about virtual nursing to make it a success?  We’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic on social media.