IT Governance Must Include Nursing Perspectives
Susan Grant, who has a nursing background and extensive healthcare leadership experience, is now chief clinical officer at healthcare operations platform company symplr. Speaking at the session, she said that she attended the conference for the first time last year and found that nursing was a topic of discussion, but nurses weren’t leading those conversations.
She encouraged nursing leadership to become better equipped to join new tech adoption projects.
“We do need to upskill ourselves. We need to learn that if we’re going to be at the table, we have to be prepared to have the dialogue and to be able to translate what we’re hearing, what we’re saying so that we can meet IT and our vendors halfway at least, so that we are driving some of those solutions.”
Bonnie Clipper, founder of the Virtual Nursing Academy, said that tech companies should better understand what nurses do during the session on how nursing is transforming and being transformed by emerging technologies.
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“We’re looking for partners, partners that want to work with us, partners that want to understand what nursing brings to the table,” Clipper, the session’s moderator, said. “We’ve not always done a good job of explaining how we add value, but there are companies even today that reduce us to an AI nurse or a chatbot. That’s not nursing.”
Whitney Staub-Juergens, vice president and COO of transformation operations at HCA Healthcare, shared how difficult it was to explain the intricacies of nurse handoff when the health system was developing an AI-powered tool with Google Cloud to improve the process.
“We’ve had to explain what handoff actually is six ways to Sunday to technologists, to operators, etc., and heard over and over again, ‘Well, it’s just when nurses exchange report.’ No, it’s not just when nurses exchange report. The nurse will go into the electronic health record and pull out a ton of information, because what they’re really doing that you don’t understand is getting set up to deliver care for the next 12 hours and they’re starting to lay out the pieces of the chess board. That’s high, strategic thinking and that’s really complex.”
With that in mind, if a solution is not being adopted, it’s likely that it has not been thoughtfully integrated into nurses’ workflows. A tool developed without their key insights won’t make it past the pilot phase.
“You’ve got to live in our shoes. You’ve got to figure out what the issues are, and you can’t do that if you’re not talking to nurses,” Clipper said.
