For a nurse, it’s all about the patients, especially spending face-to-face time with them. While it may seem counterintuitive, that’s where technology comes in.
Nurses work long, diligent hours to meet or exceed ever-growing demands. When technology works how it should, it can make the hospital ecosystem work more efficiently, freeing nurses’ time so they can spend it the right way – with patients. That can create a ripple effect: it can shorten length of stay, improve patient satisfaction, and improve and reduce nurse burnout.
When blending clinical care with technology, the technology should not add layers of burden. Nobody wants more logins, more workflows, or even a 1:1 replacement of what already exists. Instead, technology should streamline and enable more efficient, personalized care. It should eliminate unnecessary steps, manual processes and paperwork. Caregivers can spend more quality and educational time with their patients: listening, connecting, and meeting the needs of our patients with compassion. They can reach patients in new ways. And all parties involved — patients, families and caregivers — can reap the myriad rewards.
Technology, when done right, can bring out the true humanity of healthcare. As doctors and nurses, we need to remain vigilant to ensure that it does. We need to be sure we’re not just deploying a technical solution, but rather performing an analysis of current clinical systems and learning how to make the most of them. Often, we can make those systems work in ways they never could before, but it takes thought and effort.
Think how far we’ve come. Years ago at University of Iowa Stead Family Children's Hospital, if patients were in pain, they would have to push a call light to notify a nurse. An assistant would have to notify the nurse, who would then get the medication, in an elongated process. By the time the patient received the pain medication, often pain was intensified and more challenging to control. Now, patients press a pain button, and a nurse gets notified quickly via smartphone. The nurse knows right away and can quickly obtain and administer medication to relieve the patient. This reduction in pain medication turn-around time allows for better pain control and decreases the risk of pain escalation requiring higher narcotic doses.
Another example is how we at the University of Iowa are using Oneview Healthcare’s bedside technology, not only for entertainment, but to give patients more control and to create a better way to communicate with their nurses. Nurses can also use it to evaluate patient goals, education and medications. The patient engagement platform is integrated into nursing workflows and is intuitive and easy for patients to use. The system can generate reports and structured data we can query for insights. It gives us new knowledge that’s meaningful to nursing.
But we can and should do so much more. A nurse’s care plan, for instance, could be mapped out for each patient through improved interfaces with electronic health records (EHRs). A system could map the nursing care plan goals into patient-facing goals. When the patient completes those goals, it would reflect in the EHR. This would help eliminate much of the documentation nurses do. It would also help patients become more engaged in their care, making proactive decisions to improve health outcomes such as decreasing preventable readmissions.
Whatever we do next, we must ensure that nurses can focus on and are recognized for the expert clinical care that they deliver. We must enable nurses to practice at their highest level of training. We would like to see more measures to support this, or at the very least, internal metrics at health systems that put as much emphasis on clinical care as they do HCAHPS, which focuses on the “experience” of the care.
-March 5, 11:15 a.m. at the Wynn Hotel in the Petrus Ballroom: Maia Hightower, CMIO, and Pamela Kunert, nurse informaticist, at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, will present a session titled, “Bedside Technology Enhances Patient Experience, Improves Communication” at the Patient Engagement and Experience Summit, HIMSS18, Las Vegas.
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