By Judy Murphy, RN, Chief Nursing Officer, IBM
When you’re in the hospital or recovering at home, what’s the one thing that you want more of? Personal care.
Nurses want the same thing. We want to spend more time tending to our patients, giving them more individual care. The challenge today is we end up spending a good chunk of our time tracking and managing care, rather than giving it.
With an average of six patients to look after during a hospital shift, nurses are always on the move, checking different devices (such as sensors, beepers, telemetry, IV pumps, phones), manually reporting information to incoming nurses during shift changes, locating folks on the team for time-sensitive procedures, updating whiteboards, and transcribing handwritten notes made while providing care into computers. All of these administrative procedures take us away from the bedside more than we -- and our patients -- like.
Enter a new generation of mobile apps for healthcare, some of the first to come out of IBM and Apple’s partnership announced last year. They are part of the Watson Health Cloud announced this week to provide a secure and open platform for physicians, researchers, insurers and companies focused on health and wellness solutions.
Developed by nurses and for nurses, the new mobile apps are set to transform hospital and home care. A nurse’s job is, by definition, mobile. Which is exactly why mobile technology is a natural fit to help tackle the administrative and management tasks more efficiently, and organize time more effectively.
It’s about time. While our lives as consumers have been transformed by smartphones and tablets we can’t live without, healthcare hasn’t tapped the full potential of these powerful devices to improve patient care. Until now.
Apps in the hands of nurses can reshape the relationship between patients and caregivers, making nurses more organized and informed so we have more time to connect with patients. How? By making it easier for nurses to share and update patient information, contact other care team members easily, make sure that critical new data is highlighted, look up specific information, and get access to analytical tools that will streamline the delivery of care. This approach will improve care inside and out of the hospital, reduce expensive, avoid delays in admitting and discharging patients, and reduce costs by making care more effective.
Using the app for acute care, hospital nurses, nurse aides and techs will have a more efficient way of communicating care activities with each other, completing tasks, and coordinating shift changes. Rather than resorting to bits of paper to organize their work, they’ll see a schedule of all the care they need to provide to different patients, with the ability to sort and prioritize that work across their patient assignment. This approach will give them a better overview of their day, so that they can, for instance, know whether they can group together some tests or therapy while visiting a patient or when they have extra time to spend at the bedside.
Analytics tools will also help automate and prioritize critical tasks, highlighting when patients are set to be discharged and providing automatic alerts of new tasks so nurses don’t spend time constantly checking with each other or a white board. This also helps patients get all care activities completed on time so they can stay on target for discharge within their expected length of stay.
The remote care app is designed to help nurses spend more time on quality patient care in the home. The trend towards professional home health care after a hospital stay is on the rise. Preventable re-admissions cost the healthcare system $17 billion annually and hospitals are fined when these admissions occur. To assist the transition from hospital to home and help patients effectively recuperate at home, hospitals are relying more on post-discharge home visits to oversee care and ensure care continuity into the home setting.
With the new remote care app, caregivers will have an instant summary of each patient’s clinical condition, plan of care, previous home visit observations, prescribed medications, and ordered procedures at their fingertips as well as all the tools they need to facilitate the continuity of care into the home. They can follow-up on the hospital discharge instructions, provide additional teaching, and evaluate adherence to the post-discharge plan of care.
The goal is straightforward: we want to reimagine how we all work. We want to change what we expect of ourselves and from our profession. These two new suites of healthcare apps, just the first of more to come, will help bring the old way of doing things into the mobile world, driving a major shift in the care we all receive.
Judy Murphy, RN, is Chief Nursing Officer for IBM.
Follow the conversation at #IBMWatsonHealth. There is a new way to work, and it's made with IBM. Learn more at ibm.com/madewithibm or join the conversation at #MadeWithIBM
