HEALTHTECH: Although the pavilion has just opened, how will your organization measure its success? What are some other expected outcomes, and how will you respond to feedback?
One of the biggest measures will be time: How much time can I give the nurse back? Have we lessened pain points so that clinicians can operate at the top of their license? Has adopting 24/7 ambient technology reduced the instances of unwitnessed events that lead to harm? We can look at nursing documentation time, we can look at mission discharge time, we can look at fall rates, we can look at the call light volume.
When we evaluate our digital hub platform, we can look at patient engagement and see if they’re completing their education. We can review our patient engagement scores from Press Ganey. We want to see improvements in how patients are communicating with their care team. All of these involve continuous feedback loops with the units, so nothing stays static.
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HEALTHTECH: What advice do you have for other healthcare organizations who may need to upgrade their facilities? Where can they start?
Start with staffing realities. Choose tech that gives back time, not tech that adds steps. If I’m dealing with something stressful, such as going to the airport but my taxi is late, I get frustrated. Think about the nurses’ experience. They’re in charge of caring for people who may be in seriously acute conditions, but they have to waste time clicking onto a platform. You don’t want tech that adds steps or burden. It has to fit into their workflow.
Next, build smart room standards early. Don’t try to retrofit placement for sensors, cabling and cameras. That’s costly. When you’re building a new pavilion, you can’t drill or fill things in later. In some instances, we’re putting things in that we’re not turning on, but they’re in place. So, it doesn’t need to be running on day one. I think a lot of health systems get hung up on having everything go live the first day. You don’t necessarily need everything to be live. You just need it to be in place.
Thirdly, it’s key to select platforms that integrate with the electronic health record system and can scale. Try to avoid point solutions. Our digital hub for patients integrates with Epic. If it didn’t, it would be just another point solution that operates independent of the EHR. So, integrating with other systems is probably the most important aspect of selecting technology. Virtual nursing also integrates with our EHR; if it didn’t, it would have been a nonstarter. Also, bring in the front-line staff to test things as soon as possible. Make sure they have demos. They’ll see what the vendors miss. They’ll see what the technology misses. Bring them in early, and pilot if you can. That will improve the workload you have.
Finally, have real empathy for what the nurses’ or the physicians’ needs are. There’s a lot of hype around tech and AI right now, so be thoughtful and deliberate about what you select. Reach out to other health systems and see what they’ve done, what worked and what didn’t.
