A bedside nurse facing competing demands may have to weigh spending their time building a discharge plan for one patient against attending to another patient’s immediate needs.
But at Owensboro Health, much of that first job now goes to a nurse on a screen.
Since 2024, a team of virtual nurses at the Kentucky health system has supported admissions, discharge planning and medication checks while not even in the room, leaving floor staff free to stay at the bedside.
Erin Satterwhite, CEO of Optum Insight’s provider business, which built the technology behind the program, told Becker’s the tradeoff it addresses is “a point of frustration and stress for nurses that are working on the floor, because both are important.”
To date, the virtual team has completed more than 30,000 patient interactions, supported more than 3,600 admissions and assisted with more than 2,000 discharges. The nurses have also performed about 5,800 medication co-verifications, which is a second clinical check required for certain drugs. Together, Optum and Owensboro say that work has returned more than 1,700 hours to bedside nurses; in July alone, it gave back 337 hours, or nearly 11 a day.
“Patients on the floor have acute needs, and the ability to get there in a timely fashion to the next patient, the next bedside, could be meaningful in preventing a fall, catching something early and just improving the patient experience overall, because they have more face time with their nurse,” Ms. Satterwhite said.
While Optum is behind the infrastructure, Owensboro’s nurses and leadership designed the program itself.
How it works in practice is that each patient room is set up with a camera and a monitor. Patients see the virtual nurse’s face on the screen, who can talk with the patient or with the nurse at the bedside. The virtual nurse can also watch for patients at risk of falling, or zoom in and monitor a drug and its dosage during a medication check. When something needs hands-on attention, the virtual nurse can walk down to the unit and attend to the patient in-person.
The program grew out of a broader partnership that began in 2023, when Optum took over Owensboro’s revenue cycle and IT operations and hired 575 of its employees. As of 2024, Optum had struck similar revenue cycle and IT deals with at least eight other health systems. The company declined to say how many it has today.
Elsewhere, systems such as Duluth, Minn.-based Essentia Health and Detroit-based Henry Ford Health have rolled out virtual nursing programs in recent years amid persistent staffing shortages.
“In rural healthcare it’s even harder, and so the ability to put something like this in place that not only improves the nursing experience, but also improves the patient experience and gives more capacity to the system, is a win for everybody,” Ms. Satterwhite said.
