BOSTON – After bringing artificial intelligence to the systems nurses typically work with, Mercy was able to raise $52 million to retain talent and attract a workforce, improve the nurse electronic health record experience by 20 percent and increase nurse productivity by 17 percent, health system senior vice president Betty Jo Rocchio said Thursday at the HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum.
Health care has “a huge responsibility as well as an opportunity for human growth,” said Rocchio, CEO and practicing nurse.
By moving to mobile charting, developing an automated nursing credentialing system, and addressing issues with AI to improve handoffs from the emergency department to inpatient care across the health system’s 51 hospitals, Mercy has been able to create a more resilient workforce and increase employee retention.
The rewards for effort can be found in the numbers.
“We have to have analytics to know we are on the right track.”
Why the workforce is empowered by technology
Hal Wolf, chairman and CEO of HIMSS, the parent company of Healthcare IT NewsThe forum began by discussing the anomalies that the healthcare industry is still facing.
The skilled labor challenge will continue to come back regularly, he said – “causing every health care system to look and think about how to use new tools to improve or expand their ability to care for people.”
He noted that in 2018, the healthcare industry projected a global shortage of 13 million clinicians by 2035, but the World Health Organization revised that figure to 18 million about a year ago.
Rocchio agrees. “I don’t think we can wait another 10 to 15 years to know if we have enough of the people we need in the care model we’re providing today,” she says.
“One of the big focuses is how to build the workforce.”
To address that, Mercy focused on leveraging AI to address workflow and work environment challenges.
“If we can get those three issues right in health care – regardless of where the care is, whether it’s home hospital, whether it’s virtual care or bedside care in a hospital – then we’re a lot further along than we are today,” she said.
When looking at evidence-based data, a team of technology experts, nursing leaders and information technology experts said what matters most to the current generation of nursing professionals is flexible pay, work-life balance and schedule control, Rocchio said.
“Today, we cannot underestimate the value of the concept of human development and say that although we need people to work in a certain way, newer generations will not do that,” she said.
“I just want to be blunt, we’re in trouble in health care, sometimes in the implementation. We have to go back and clean up in an organized way the way technology needs to be used.”
The healthcare system’s digital transformation journey follows a path based on Everett Rogers’ theory of diffusion of innovation and now has a system and process that revolves around the workforce.
By adding an automated nursing certification system, Mercy has reduced the time spent on recruiting and scheduling by about 25 percent, she said.
Once the core nursing, agency nursing and flexible nursing teams are recruited, they use the certification system to design the shifts they want and it has worked.
“The concept of supply and demand has been around for a million years,” she said. “We apply it to healthcare, we put technology into it, and we have the analytics to measure it ourselves.”
While nursing managers were initially concerned about filling their schedules, data showed that staff would take up the available shifts.
“Two years on, everything is still working fine, you can still see all the data, and everyone is calm. But to get to that point, it took a little bit of pain.”
Reduce nurse cognitive load
Rocchio said spending 240 minutes per shift on the EHR increases the mental burden and leads to faster nurse burnout.
“The main goal of attacking the work environment and workflow is to reduce the nurses’ cognitive workload,” she said.
“We know that keeping them at the bedside is important. But if we increase their workload while they are working, we may be alienating them.”
To address this, Mercy is leveraging mobile-first operations with Epic’s Rover to reduce desktop time, but also leveraging artificial intelligence to improve patient handoffs from emergency departments.
By cutting across the different lanes used in an EHR – doctors, medicine, labs, pharmacy, etc. – an AI-enhanced system will scan the entire emergency room record to bring critical information to the surface and put it in the hands of nurses.
“That recommendation part will look at the orders, what the doctor has signed and bring up anything they still have to do for the resident nurse and deliver it to their mobile phone.”
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
