The nursing profession is changing — largely driven by information technology that can help nurses meet a growing list of challenges, says Summer Blackerby, RN, director of nursing information at CoxHealth Hospital in Springfield, Missouri.
Blackerby knows what it’s like to be a nurse today and the challenges nurses face on a daily basis. She’s also very familiar with the current state of nursing informatics – how it’s helping and where it needs improvement.
Furthermore, she knows why and how hospitals and health systems should adopt technology that allows nurses to provide care beyond the bedside. Not to mention technology helps streamline the nursing process.
And on another front, she understands the importance of nursing IT in supporting personal care.
We sat down for an in-depth interview with Blackerby to discuss all of these topics and share her expertise with our readers.
Q. What is the job of a nurse today? What are the challenges you face every day? Where are you looking for help?
ONE. I think it goes without saying that nursing today is more complicated than ever. However, I also believe that this is still one of the most rewarding professions. We are caring for an aging patient population with complex medical conditions or comorbidities, which coupled with an ongoing clinician shortage, contributes to challenges in retaining and attracting more physicians. Clinician comes to the bedside.
As a result, you see health systems looking for solutions to support more time-consuming tasks like documentation, education, and anything that provides an opportunity to bring clinicians back to the bedside to provide hands-on care. While these tasks are important and necessary, there are equally effective ways to accomplish them and free up more time for the bedside care team.
Another challenge nurses face is information overload and alert fatigue. As technology has increasingly advanced in the care environment, it has reached a point where teams are now overloaded with alerts, leading to alert fatigue and desensitization.
We must rethink how to equip nurses and clinicians with the right technology to balance highly technical environments with the delivery of focused, person-centered care. Deploying technology that effectively aggregates data and presents it to clinicians to expedite care interventions is key to minimizing information overload and ensuring timely Priority notifications are noted.
This is the foundation for creating a safer care environment and providing the best patient care possible.
To combat this, nurses need access to technologies that focus on all aspects of care and improve the functioning of the care team. This need is not limited to acute care but is a consistent need across the entire care continuum. Using modern technology to increase nursing productivity and redesigning care models to overcome some of these challenges is essential.
Hospital remote monitoring and telemedicine systems play a key role in redistributing the workload of care to team members, allowing the bedside nurse to focus on hands-on care while other members of the virtual care team complete tasks that do not require a bedside presence. These tools also allow for standardization of care across the spectrum as a dedicated team becomes skilled at managing alerts and focusing on the virtual care process.
At CoxHealth, our strategic focus over the past two years on hospital telehealth capabilities, such as eICU and eAcute, has had a profound impact and is supporting our vision of transforming change care delivery. The impacts are being demonstrated in improvements in our patient outcomes and are also being demonstrated in staff satisfaction. As more health systems implement similar technologies into their workflows, we will continue to see a positive impact.
Q. What is the current state of nursing informatics? How does it help? Where needs improvement?
ONE. I have been fortunate to have worked in nursing informatics for over 15 years. I will openly admit that when I stumbled into healthcare technology, it was still very unusual to have a nurse working in an IT department. We have made significant strides over the years, but we still have a long way to go.
Our profession is more widely accepted, but we need to be more present in many of the conversations that happen at many different levels of healthcare. I often say, “When in doubt, bring in the nursing informatics team.” We are there to support and identify where technology can improve workflows, eliminate steps by streamlining applications, or eliminate manual work by implementing new technologies.
Technology has certainly changed the way we practice nursing and care for patients. I am optimistic about the future and how health technology and virtual care models will support nurses by leveraging advances in AI capabilities and the potential to automate often heavy routine tasks masonry.
Overall, it remains difficult to aggregate the abundance of data, especially for patients with complex medical conditions. While the volume of patient data generated by patient monitors and other medical devices is increasing, this data is often presented to care teams in a disparate format.
Designing systems that integrate data into clinical workflows in a meaningful way remains a focus. A recent example is a solution we implemented that aggregates data from various medical devices and presents the data on a dashboard used by a multidisciplinary team.
This has enabled our care teams to collaborate in ways that were not possible before, and it has strengthened collaboration among our RT, early intervention, provider, and nursing teams. Presenting information in a comprehensive manner is important to help all nurses make effective and informed clinical decisions.
When this is not done well, it takes up extra time for nurses and can also impact patient care. It can also make it difficult for interdisciplinary care teams to collaborate on treatment decisions, which can ultimately impact the level of personalized care a patient receives.
Q. Why should hospitals and health systems adopt technology that allows nurses to care for patients beyond the bedside?
ONE. Care delivery models are changing. Technology continues to support the delivery of increasingly complex care outside of traditional care settings. Patients’ willingness to adopt technology in many other areas of their lives also plays a role in driving how they want to use technology to interact with their healthcare team.
We must meet our patients where they are and provide more options for them to balance their health and wellness with the demands of life.
Knowing that nurses remain the primary point of contact for patients receiving care at home, we need to ensure seamless access to technologies and resources that help them communicate with patients and help guide them through care journey.
Effectively engaging the care team outside the hospital can facilitate earlier care interventions and guide patients to the appropriate level of care, ensuring that only those who need in-person care receive it. Leveraging virtual care technology can create efficiencies within the hospital, such as freeing up space, reducing wait times, and reducing the administrative work nurses must complete before and after appointments.
Nursing informatics specialists bring expertise in the design, implementation and application of technology and play a vital role in ensuring nurses remain familiar with emerging forms of technology.
Q. Why should service delivery organizations adopt technology that streamlines the nursing process?
ONE. I have personally experienced the impact that technology can have on the nursing workflow, and overall, the effects are often positive. However, I have also experienced technology implementations that did not improve the care delivery process. Informatics plays an important role in evaluating and determining how technology will actually integrate into the clinician’s workflow, rather than becoming just another task they have to deal with.
A recent example of the use of technology is our virtual care program that I mentioned earlier. This project involved frontline clinicians from the beginning of the pilot and throughout all stages of design and implementation. As a result, it was one of the more transformative projects in acute care.
While staffing shortages impacted our ability to engage frontline clinicians on projects, this was one of the most valuable decisions we made. We attribute much of the success of this program to our human-centered design approach; technology is enabling change, but it is our clinicians and nurses who are leading the change.
Q. What is the importance of nursing IT in supporting personal care?
ONE. Personalized care is achieved by providing our nursing and clinical teams with the right information at the right time. While it may sound simple, it must be fully supported by a robust technology infrastructure that is truly designed with clinicians and patients in mind.
Our medical records are filled with data, we must continually challenge ourselves to ensure that we are tasking clinicians with collecting and analyzing data that truly drives care. The art and science of personalized care relies on multiple processes and workflows that inform decisions by taking into account all elements of care for each individualized patient.
Nurses are always closest to patients and our nursing informatics team remains close to our nursing team to support and design workflows that support the best care. Leveraging multiple technological modalities allows both bedside and virtual care teams to engage in meaningful ways with patients and their families, ultimately creating an environment where clinicians readiness is fully supported and patients receive care that is personalized to them.
I am optimistic about the future of healthcare and how we can continue to leverage technology to transform our care delivery system. The magic is in striking a balance in moving forward at the pace at which technology is advancing while still keeping a human-centric and patient-centric focus. The past two years have proven more than ever in our organization that it is possible.
Seeing nurses and patients respond so positively to our virtual nursing program has motivated me to continue looking for solutions to the challenges we are facing, and I would like to reiterate that I still believe that nursing – health care – is one of the most rewarding careers a person can pursue. It’s meaningful to be a part of caring for individuals on their health journey.
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