Hospitals across the country are turning to technology to lighten the load for nurses and streamline clinical workflows. Ideas and opportunities to streamline clinical work are a dime a dozen; but what actually works?
Regina Foley, PhD, RN, executive vice president and chief nurse executive and chief transformation and integration officer of Edison, N.J.-based Hackensack Meridian Health, inspired her team to transform in the last year.
“An impactful change we have made is a conscious effort to reduce the administrative burden on the bedside team,” she said. “This includes our ‘Dump the Junk’ effort, which has resulted in flowsheet macros that decrease the amount of time nurses spend in the system documenting commonly charted items.”
The initiative also led to automated ambulatory specialist notes that improved communication with referring physicians as well as patient care. The Hackensack Meridian team also leveraged technology, the Nursing Assignment Wizard, to provide charge nurses with information they need to make patient assignments based on multiple factors, including workload acuity. Finally, the health system was able to reduce interruptive practice alerts by 70%.
Johnson City, Tenn.-based Ballad Health has implemented a similar initiative to weed out unnecessarily cumbersome processes and workflows. The developed and implemented the GRoSS initiative, standing for “Get Rid of the Stupid Stuff,” said Pam Austin, senior vice president and CIO of Ballad Health. The initiative was designed for clinicians to identify and report processes and workflows within Epic that are “poorly designed, unnecessary or nonsensical.” Clinicians are directly participating in the project improvement efforts.
“Since we launched the program in May, we’ve had over 200 submissions and more than a quarter of those requests have already been resolved,” Ms. Austin told Becker’s earlier this year. “We’re tracking at a high submission rate compared to other Epic organizations with GRoSS programs, which tells us there is great clinical engagement.”
Ballad is piloting the Epic Rover in two of its surgical units and the Level 1 trauma hospital to file vitals within one to five minutes , which traditionally took a longer time. They’re also implementing Epic Flowsheet to save clinical staff more than 15 million clicks in seven months.
The implementation has been a whole-team effort and Ballad is generating more opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration.
“Ballad Health’s nursing and IT leadership built a partnership represented through the recently launched nursing productivity and satisfaction end user group whose main goals are to optimize Epic in the nursing space and improve nurse well-being by focusing on nursing involvement, efficiency and satisfaction with our organizations EHR,” said Ms. Austin.
Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston placed data at the fingertips of nurses and physicians to promote innovation.
“One of the most impactful changes we’ve made recently is expanding our self-service analytics capabilities for frontline teams and clinical teams,” said Eric Smith, senior vice president and chief digital officer at Memorial Hermann Health System. “With the rollout of Epic and other tools, we’ve made it easier for end users to access and explore the data they need without waiting on someone else to build a report.”
Nurse managers can track staffing trends and operational leaders can review throughput metrics quicker to make decisions in real time, said Mr. Smith. Placing data reports at the clinical team’s fingertips will lead to smarter decisions and better outcomes.
“This shift has not only improved efficiency across the board, but it’s also freed up our analytics team to focus on more complex, system-level initiatives,” said Mr. Smith. “Ultimately, it’s about giving our people the tools to solve problems and improve care.”
