Healthcare leaders discuss solutions to retain their nurses. From left to right: Moderator Tearsanee Davis, Director of Clinical Programs and Strategy for the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Center for Telehealth; Pamela Ograbisz, Associate Vice President of Telehealth, LocumTenens.com and LT Telehealth; Ashley VonNida, Chief Nursing Officer, Equum Medical; Sarah Bell, Nurse Administrator for Virtual Nursing, Remote Patient Monitoring, and Advanced Care at Home, Mayo Clinic; and Dr. Troy Leo, Senior Medical Director for Virtual Health, Atrium Health.
Dr. Troy Leo, senior medical director of virtual health at Atrium Health, also said that virtual nursing should be viewed not as a way to change nursing ratios but as a tool to offload the heavy burdens on those bedside nurses’ plates. “Don’t try to sell virtual nursing as a way to lessen your ratios and lessen the number of physical nurses. It’s the wrong answer,” he said.
As a lesson for other healthcare leaders, Leo described a failure his team experienced when trying to spread virtual nursing beyond the initial COVID-19 medical surge unit. Because it had worked so well there — with patient and staff satisfaction scores increasing — Leo said the team thought they could just replicate the processes for different unit. However, because they didn’t consider the particular needs of the other unit, the virtual nurses weren’t used as much initially. So, he said, they adapted and communicated what support they could give based on the needs of that unit. “Make sure you’re really communicating what you can offer,” he said.
Tracking the key performance indicators of staff satisfaction, staff retention and the cost of labor will help keep a healthcare organization’s virtual nursing program relevant to the workers they want to support. It’s imperative to be “really data-driven and always evaluating and looking at how we’re doing it and where we need to go,” Bell said.
“That’s the beauty of virtual nursing, that it can always be changed. It’s malleable to whatever your needs are.”
WATCH: How Atrium Health’s virtual nursing observation program mitigates clinician burnout.
Houston Methodist Shares Lessons Learned from Fast Implementation
In less than a year, Houston Methodist rolled out a virtual nursing solution to some 20 units and has already notched about 20,000 patient encounters.
Because the large health system was experiencing many of the same workforce stresses as its peers, leaders knew they had to try something innovative to immediately help bedside teams, said Steve Klahn, the inpatient clinical director for virtual medicine at Houston Methodist.
Aroub Khleif, the organization’s administrative director of innovation, ambulatory and clinical systems, said a unified, team-based approach to break down siloes, coupled with reliance on the tech tools that were already available and recognized as secure, helped them stay agile.
“Your main focus when you’re initially launching should be to look and evaluate your existing technology stack, instead of trying to find a new solution,” Khleif said. “We opted into the path of, let’s use what we have. Do we have buy-in? Does this work? If so, we’ll go from there.”
