Nurses have a huge responsibility during each and every shift. They are not only responsible for patient care, but also for recording information for each patient into their patient records and for updating the rest of the clinical team. ViSi Mobile is an extremely useful tool for not only providing continuous vital sign monitoring but also for improving nursing workflow.
Optimizing nursing workflow helps to ensure that the best possible care is delivered to patients and improves clinical outcomes. This is an age-old discussion that is had by leadership to solve one of many problems ranging from nurse burnout to budgeting issues. By definition, “workflow is the sequence of physical and mental tasks performed by various people within and between work environments”1. Workflow is also defined as a logical sequence of operations, which are carried out in order to obtain a predefined result within the delivery of clinical services. Nurses are given the huge responsibility of managing care for multiple different patients during a given shift. The patients that they are caring for all may have different diagnoses, be of various levels of acuity, and may or may not be ambulatory. In other words, they can be very complex and the assignment they get is not always split up with acuity as the main focus.
The workflow of nurses is frequently referred to as chaotic and they may not be able to complete an activity before being pulled away to another activity or task. Many times they have doctors needing information, patients requesting medication, or to use the bathroom, and that is the time when the most critical patient in the assignment begins to go downhill. Interruptions, especially when unneeded, can lead to critical patient safety events and must be avoided whenever possible.
Many nurses rarely have the conditions needed to foster critical thinking and the impact is great. Nursing administrators are frequently evaluating how to optimize the nursing workflow to improve patient safety, nursing satisfaction, patient satisfaction, and clinical efficiency. To help optimize the nursing workflow it is essential to understand the environment in which nurses work.
Hospitals are slowly rolling out efforts to improve nursing workflow. For example, in 2019, Spartanburg Regional Medical Center in South Carolina partnered with Omnicell to digitize and automate their medication management. With mobile medication cabinets linked to a barcode point-of-care, it increased nurses' time for face-to-face patient interaction, documentation, as well as other productive patient care activities by 28%.
The introduction of new technologies and treatment methodologies into clinical care can definitely improve workflow design and efficiency. When it comes to patient monitoring, ViSi Mobile is a vital signs surveillance monitoring solution that displays all the vital signs all the time including continuous noninvasive blood pressure.
Continuous vital signs monitoring improves the nursing workflow by eliminating the time it takes to gather and document vital signs. This system has wide parameter vital signs and notifies the nurses with actionable alarms for the key vital signs. This along with integration with the electronic health record and through the delivery of the alarms to the nurse’s mobile device and constant patient data available at the RVD (Remote Visual Display) are paired together to create a workflow that is conducive to increasing patient safety and helping nurses.
ViSi Mobile highly recommends a workflow for managing alarms that reduces interruptions to the nursing staff. It is very important to get the right alarm/alert to the right person. Insight is a ViSi Mobile middleware application that assists in triaging alerts and alarms to the right clinician. A workflow that minimizes interruptions and creates a meaningful system for notifying the nurse when the patient needs assessment improves the overall workflow and encourages critical thinking.
Sources:
https://journals.lww.com/jonajournal/Abstract/2010/09000/Transforming_Nursing_Workflow,_Part_1__The_Chaotic.6.aspx
https://journals.lww.com/jonajournal/Abstract/2011/10000/Barriers_to_Critical_Thinking__Workflow.6.aspx