How Virtual Nursing Enhances Daily Workflows and Improves Care
Virtual nursing offers transformative benefits for patient care, hospital efficiency, and nurse support. Key areas where it can scale quickly include:
- Hospital Throughput: Virtual nurses can streamline admissions, discharges, and ER support, improving patient flow and reducing delays.
- Nurse Collaboration: Virtual nursing provides real-time mentorship, allowing nurses to consult with experienced colleagues instantly, fostering better teamwork and reducing stress.
- AI-Enhanced Care: AI alerts help nurses prioritize tasks, such as ensuring patients are mobilized to prevent complications like pressure ulcers.
To ensure success, focus on these areas before expanding. Building a business case based on improvements in efficiency, satisfaction, and cost savings is essential for broader adoption. Virtual nursing has the potential to reshape healthcare if implemented thoughtfully.
Listen to Holly Lorenz, Narinder Singh, and Tiffany Wyatt explore mapping virtual nursing onto their Day in the Life.
Video Transcript
Tiffany Wyatt:
Well Holly, that’s a perfect segue into talking a little bit more diving deeper into the virtual nursing. And I wanted to talk about this slide and well, I want to understand what stands out to you particularly important and something that maybe has a potential to scale quickly. And so looking at this, this is how we think about virtual nursing in these categories, but I also know that virtual nursing can have so many more things that they can do, have so much more impact, but for instance, impact the hospital throughput. You’ve already mentioned that admits and discharges, but we also see that with ER support or patient family education updates before the patient gets discharged so that we can have that discharge process go more smoothly. And then mentorship you also brought up as being a huge part of virtual nursing, but also dual nurse sign off just so you don’t have to run down the hall to get that other nurse. And then where we really feel like we stand out is the improving the patient care with ai, which we’ll talk about later. So again, what stands out to you as really important, something that has a potential to scale quickly or has the potential to make a ton of impact with some of these things? For virtual nursing,
Holly Lorenz:
I think there’s been adoption probably in the impact of through hospital throughput in varying levels of adoption and some of that, I think as we said, it’s admission and discharges and certainly some of the how can we discharge a patient earlier in the day. I think people are exposed to that and understand that very well. I think we have had less opportunity to really identify how we can build a bedside team. Just think if you’re a new nurse or even a nurse that’s in a environment that something’s new happening. In many instances, if there’s an event that’s going on, there isn’t someone that’s there for hands on the ground that’s right by your side to help you. But if you can call your virtual nurse and say, here’s what’s happening, tell me if you’re seeing the same thing I am. Tell me, even walk me through putting in a line that I haven’t put in before or something like that.
It’s like this partnership and we haven’t really sold it as much as a partnership. We’ve really sold it as you need someone else to help you do this. And so we really need to look at this partnership from someone that’s just in time ready and available. In my mind, I believe nurses don’t really understand all of the things better in this third bucket of improving patient care with an AI nudge. I think seeing is believing even if it’s a 32nd or a 15 second video of here’s what we can do because a patient hasn’t been out of bed all day and we all know that that’s the number one reason that discharges are often delayed or we can prevent pressure ulcers because they’re someone that’s going to tap us on the shoulder and say, guess what? This patient hasn’t moved or been out of bed all day. So it’s allowing someone to call out something that needs our attention that we’ve been probably too busy, we haven’t ignored it, but we’ve probably been too busy to put that in our workflow for the day. Yet someone’s doing it in a way that they’ve already got the information and they’re just helping redirect what we take a look at.
Tiffany Wyatt:
And I completely agree with you on the partnership and I hope and believe that in the future virtual nurse will just be part of the care team, not so separated as virtual nurse and bedside or hands-on nurse. It’s just part of the care team and that will be something that we’ll see in the future.
Narinder Singh:
Holly, is there anything on this list or things you’ve heard around virtual nursing where you just kind of cringe a little bit and you’re like, Hey, it’s great, the tool is as great as where you apply it but you can’t apply it anywhere. Is there things that you see people doing or even things we’ve listed here that you’re like, I would not start with that or I’m very skeptical of that being something that’s really going to actually have an impact on the bedside?
Holly Lorenz:
Well, I am reminded of an early conversation I had with you about the list of things for virtual nursing and we were focused just on basically this list and I had 10 other things of where we are with this and you said, whoa, let’s us really nail this so everyone sees this as the initial platform and then let’s start to look at all these other things are meaningful, but really let’s not overwhelm again what adoption looks like for people. So I believe this is the list that needs our first focus. Without a doubt
Narinder Singh:
You have never been short of ideas and so I appreciate that balance for sure.