The health system is rolling out an enterprise communication strategy that gives every nurse and doctor access to a smartphone, and expecting to see ROI in everything from reduced steps per shift to better patient care.
It’s still not unusual to see a doctor or nurse walking around in a hospital with several different communication devices. Sentara Health is investing millions of dollars in a program to reduce that cluster to one smartphone.
The health system, with 11 hospitals in Virginia and one in northeastern North Carolina, is equipping nurses and doctors across the enterprise with a specialized smartphone from Mobile Heartbeat, giving them one device to communicate, access patient records, scan labels and devices, take images of patient wounds, check medications and submit orders.
Tim Skeen, Sentara’s Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, says the health system needs to erase pain points caused by slow or ineffective communications and problems with data access. Those problems not only endanger clinical outcomes, but also contribute to staff stress and burnout.
“This was really important for us, especially for our nurses,” he says. To accommodate clinicians who “don’t want another device,” Sentara made the platform available through an app that they could download on their own smartphones.
The devices aren’t typical smartphones. They don’t allow access to cell service, social media, games or app stores, but they are HIPAA-compliant and integrated with Sentara’s Epic EHR.
Tim Skeen, EVP and Chief Information Officer, Sentara Health. Photo courtesy Sentara Health.
Skeen says Sentara’s leadership had planned on a two-year rollout but shortened that timeline after seeing how successful the devices have been. Scanning compliance has jumped from roughly 85% to almost 100%, he says, while access to so-called “flowsheet information” has gone from hours to minutes.
Clinicians—especially nurses--are also communicating much more frequently with the devices. Skeen says one hospital logged roughly 35 messages between clinicians in the two months prior to rolling out the smartphones, and saw more than 1,310 messages in the month after the devices were introduced.
“This phone improves workflow and patient safety,” Christy Grabus, Chief Nursing Officer of Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center, said in a story posted by the health system in September. “All of this helps us prioritize and spend more time at the bedside with our patients.”
“We can be more in the moment with the patient,” added Adrienne Cruz, a registered nurse unit coordinator at Sentara Princess Anne Hospital. “I can answer more questions than I could’ve before. We have more time to give the patient that little extra tender loving care that we'd like to.”
Additionally, Skeen and Sentara executives are expecting to see a reduction in the time physicians spend waiting for an imaging or diagnostic test, and the time spent by nurses and physicians trying to find someone, either by paging them or just walking through the hospital. Medications will be administered and treatments started faster, potentially reducing a patient’s length of stay. They’ll also see a change in nurse workflows, such as less steps taken during a shift, a precursor to reduced stress and anxiety and a better nurse satisfaction rate.
“Giving a patient medication through an IV pump has gone from 80 steps to just 10 steps,” Madison Carrara, a nurse and senior IT specialty analyst at the health system, said in the Sentara release. “Nurses used to have to walk around the room four or five times to scan everything. Now with the phone, they can walk up to the bedside, scan the patient, medication, and pump all from the same spot.”
Skeen says that data will be important in proving the value of an enterprise device strategy.
“It’s not easy to get a hard ROI around this significant investment--it’s millions and millions of dollars,” he says, noting it will take a good 12-18 months of full operation to get the metrics they need to prove ROI. “There are some hard cost benefits, and there are benefits that are very hard to document and measure.”
The strategy isn’t new. Health systems and hospitals have been choosing between in-house communications and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategies for close to two decades. But the technology and the connectivity have greatly improved over that time, giving executives more of a reason to embrace devices that can efficiently address a larger number of pain points.
Still, Skeen said Sentara Health took almost a year to plan the rollout. They had to make sure every campus was fully accessible by Wi-Fi, so that no urgent messages would be dropped or lost, and that the health system’s IT infrastructure could support the additional devices. The devices themselves had to be rugged and durable, surviving drops and other potential catastrophes, and equipped with a remote-wipe capability should they be lost or stolen. And charging stations had to be mapped out, so that clinicians could easily and conveniently check in, get a fully charged device, and return them at the end of the shift to a charger.
Leadership also had to create separate protocols for doctors, with different levels of access for employed physicians and for those with access privileges. And all doctors who access the platform on their own devices have to agree to certain conditions regarding privacy and security.
Skeen advises healthcare executives looking into an enterprise device strategy to carefully map out all the uses and endpoints on the platform, making sure no program or use is overlooked. And spend plenty of time on HIPAA compliance, endpoint security and connectivity.
He says the devices play into Sentara Health’s virtual and connected care strategies, including telesitting, virtual ICU and virtual nursing. He expects the devices will someday be made available to clinicians in more than 400 care sites in the Sentara Health network and even incorporated into home health and acute care at home programs.
“There are a lot of things that we’re trying to virtualize now,” he says.
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation at HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Sentara Health is partnering with Mobile Heartbeat to equip every nurse with a smartphone, while physicians can either have a device or download an app on their own devices.
The smartphones don’t have access to cell coverage, social media, games or an app store, but allow users to communicate across the enterprise, scan barcodes, take pictures of wounds, check medications and access the EHR.
Executives say the strategy will improve communications, reducing care gaps and time spent searching for someone, and give nurses and doctors more time to spend in front of their patients.