Richmond, Ind.-based Reid Health has rooms armed with digital whiteboards and door signs with information fed from the Epic EHR. When clinicians enter the room after a code is initiated, their badges prompt real-time data on labs and medications to pop up on the screen.
“We all see the staffing challenges with nursing, and this isn’t something that’s going to improve,” Misti Foust-Cofield, MSN, RN, vice president and chief nursing officer of Reid Health, told Becker’s at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. “Our goal is for this to be a recruitment and retention tool for our teams and to better serve our patients. Anytime that we can save on our steps, that we can take off some of the cognitive burden, that’s our intention.”
The technology is already attracting talent through a smart room simulation center at a local community college and Indiana University campus.
“It’s a wonderful recruitment piece,” Ms. Foust-Cofield said. “It essentially makes for a seamless transition to our work environment.”
The one-hospital system takes a collaborative approach to technology. Ms. Foust-Cofield works closely with her CIO to, as she put it, “give input on the sandwich I’m going to have to eat.”
The biggest challenge has been figuring out how to be “thoughtful and intentional” about how they’re educating staff as to not inundate them with new technology, Ms. Foust-Cofield said.
“Nurses are very open to technology,” she said. “Nurses are advocates, as long as they’re included in the process.”
Reid Health also launched virtual sitting last week, addressing staffing and employee safety concerns, and plans to unveil virtual nursing over the summer. The health system only considers technology that integrates with Epic or its smart technology vendor, Hellocare.
“We have the foundation laid, so now we can just add on the different modalities that we choose,” Ms. Foust-Cofield said. “Our goal is to move to ambient listening, so patients will be able to activate a call light [through speech], and the nurse can speak out loud and do all of their documentation. When I look at our nurses, my team spends, on average, about 153 minutes in the medical record a shift, which is insane.”