Nurses touch most systems and virtually every aspect of patient care and experience, so gaining their buy-in is key to successful technology implementation.
That’s why hospital and health system IT leaders are keenly aware when nurses feel disappointed or frustrated with technology. Taking the right approach to implementing technology can help overcome nurses’ understandable skepticism toward new technologies that promise to make their lives easier.
Nurses are numb from repeated technology implementations that don’t live up to their promise. Each technology requires a significant investment of their time and attention, and often involves lasting workflow changes. Nurses might welcome those changes if they believed there were a greater benefit.
Here are five ways to demonstrate technology’s value and increase nurse buy-in.
1. Integrate solutions: To deliver and maximize benefits technology plans must integrate current, siloed technologies into a single platform. Connecting these systems delivers incredible synergies in the same way that combining a camera and internet access in a smartphone enabled things we never imagined a decade ago. Providing access to these technologies through a single access point builds confidence that future technology implementations will be part of this same ecosystem and won’t require relearning everything from scratch.
2. Empower patients: Another key deliverable is to create a self-service environment for patients. Empowering patients and their families to control aspects of an inpatient stay (room lighting and temperature, meals, entertainment, patient education) – and direct service requests to the appropriate team member – has a positive impact on patient experience and outcomes. It also allows nurses to focus their time on what called them into nursing in the first place – drawing on years of training and experience to care for patients. Plus, a better work environment helps retain and recruit nurses.
3. Recruit ambassadors: Nurses, like physicians, place significantly more trust in what they hear from their peers than from IT consultants or hospital leadership. It’s critical to identify and equip nurses as ambassadors for your technology efforts. Let them know that you will give them the tools they need to carry the message to their peers. All they need to bring is their enthusiasm for the system and their natural leadership skills.
4. Share data: Build trust with your ambassadors by showing the impact of a unified technology platform on measures that are critical to nurses: patient outcomes, patient experience, and nurse workflow and experience. Commit to sharing your metrics with nurses.
5. Continue engaging: Finally, continue to proactively talk to your nursing staff. Gather feedback from nurses and leadership to understand the workflow impact from the technology. Then communicate about these impacts. If you identify challenges discuss how you plan to address them. Measure the benefits and keep nurses informed through regular follow up.
It takes a mix of sharp strategic thinking, implementation excellence and open communication to build buy-in from nurses for technology. Increasing nurse satisfaction with technology reduces burnout and leads to the ultimate goals of better patient outcomes, satisfaction and loyalty, making the effort well worthwhile.
Antoinette Thomas, RN, MSN, is Chief Nursing Officer and Mike Bechtel is Vice President, North American Sales for Oneview Healthcare, a company that is transforming the patient experience by unifying disparate technologies into a single, easy-to-use interface for better quality of care, efficiencies, revenue and satisfaction.