The Use of Technology

“Now more than ever, health systems must protect nurses from spending time on work that falls outside of core nursing responsibilities.9 Technology can make life easier for medical professionals and patients alike. It can help relieve the burden on the clinical nurse by enabling some responsibilities to be automated and more expedient, freeing time for nurses to prioritize more critical patient needs. There are numerous innovative technologies leaders should consider integrating into nurse workflow so care teams can think and work in new ways. Examples include the following:

• Technology-driven pumps and monitors that automate the collection of information needed for care
• Smart devices, including automated beds and vital sign monitoring
• Wearables that provide clinical data to the provider
• Virtual rounding technology that prompts patients and family members with questions via text to scale rounding efforts and prioritize needs
• Electronic white boards integrated with the electronic health record to keep patients and families up to date
• Centralized data command centers that integrate multiple systems into a single monitoring center, including coordination of care, requests for services, and discharge tracking
• Robotics to save nursing and ancillary care time 10
• Artificial intelligence to assist with wound assessment and sepsis capture for nurses that results in quality outcomes at lower cost 11
• Tele-technology that enables virtual inpatient care models, including virtual sitter and virtual expert RN models 12
• Mobile apps that enable bidirectional communication between patients and clinicians across all levels of care. These can improve nurses’ access to patient information, streamline communication and patient education, and provide patients themselves more control over their health. When digital health apps have the look and feel of other mobile apps such as Doordash or Netflix, which are already familiar to consumers, they will require minimal or no instruction.”