Today in health, it common spirit plans to have virtual nursing in every market. By the end of 23. And I'll bet your health system has plans in this direction as well. So we're going to talk about it today. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health, a set of channels dedicated to keeping health it staff current.

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, Chicago based common spirit health, and tends to have virtual nursing in every market. By the end of 23. With plans to have it across the entire system within five years. The health system, which has more than 140 hospitals across 21 states. He has started rolling out its proprietary virtual nursing technology with a recent launch at St. Joseph hospital in Lexington, Kentucky.

, one of the places it loses money. Early results have been positive. According to Cathy, Sanford, RN, executive vice president and chief nursing officer at common spirit health. We have higher patient satisfaction scores, higher nursing satisfaction scores, decreased length of stay, decreased infections.

, decreased false. Ms. Sanford told Becker's noting the official study results will be released. In about a year and that's consistent with what we're hearing everywhere else. , obviously it drives a significant amount of efficiency as well, and she steers clear of that for the most part. , common spirit has two types of virtual nurses. One who work at a command center.

To help with admissions. Discharges and transfers and ones who are part of the care team. Attending rounds with physicians and being available to patients at the push of a button.

The system is debuting the initiative and its medical surgical units, med surge units. We think it will be the inpatient model of the future in someday connect the outpatient model that will also have a lot of virtual care. For people outside the hospital. Ms. Sanford said the house system started developing the program in 2008 when its board approved.

And his way to stem the nursing shortage forecasted for the early 2020s. In 2016 counter spirit became the

first system to be awarded a patent for virtual nursing for the combination of care model and camera set up.

The internal platform was developed by Dr. Joel ward system vice-president of medical informatics. In partnership with Linda Goodwin. A nurse. Systems senior vice-president of nursing transformation and innovation. Ms. Sanford said the program benefits, both new nurses who have an experience virtual, a colleague. They can consult an older nurses who might be able to stay in the profession longer. She said it is no way meant to replace nurses, obviously not because we don't have enough as it is.

, it'll change as it evolves so forth and so on. You know, I love this model. I think it makes a lot of sense. I think it's addressing one of the biggest problems we face. In healthcare, I think it's addressing a secondary problem that common spirit faces. , over and above the nursing shortage and the ability to provide the high quality care that they're looking to provide. And that is cost effectively delivering clinical care. So, , I think it kills two birds with one stone. Let me tell you some of the things that jump out at me. And again, I don't know, I'm not interviewing somebody here, but, , proprietary nature of it. , I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of, , I'm not sure how scalable it is, but here's the point I want to make iterate to perfection.

Don't let perfection get into the way of getting started. And I love the fact that they're getting started and they're being aggressive and they're going to move it out because regardless of if this is, if the prep proprietary way that they're doing it today is the way they're going to be doing it three years from now, they're going to learn a ton.

They're going to fine tune their processes. They're going to get people used to this kind of workflow in this kind of, , , ability to interact with their colleagues. , in a virtual setting and those kinds of things, they're going to stand up. , policies, procedures. You get it. They're going to stand all those things up. And they're going to have two years of progress in a direction when they, when they decide potentially that a proprietary direction is not as good as an open direction that they could be heading down. And so as an it leader, I would hear this and I would have hesitancy, but I would, I would support it.

And the reason I would support it is because I believe the progress is worth the, , the, the tech debt that you're going to incur. In the process. And my guess is if they started this in 2008, There's a, there's already a significant amount of tech debt. Associated with this rollout, but once it's out and you have it, there processes, policies.

A workflow. , culture, you get all that stuff in place. Now, when you come back in with a platform that is going to take you maybe five or 10 years down the road. , because again, we're looking at a platform instead of proprietary technology. Now you, , you know, you have something to build off of and you're already having a Madam. The hardest thing on any of these projects is getting the momentum and it takes an awful lot of effort to get this ball rolling.

And this gets the ball rolling, and I think it's going to move them down the field a lot quicker and, , just applaud what they're doing. All right. That's all for today. Do you know if some of that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com or wherever you listen to podcasts, apple, Google, overcast, Spotify.

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