Stay on top of evolving tech developments in patient care and management.
Advancements in technology are helping healthcare systems to improve clinical outcomes, efficiently track large amounts of patient data, streamline staffing, reduce human error, and give nurses more time for patient care, to name a few.
These three recent technology stories from HealthLeaders will help nurse leaders keep on top of evolving industry developments:
A program in North Carolina aims to research and develop virtual care services that address health inequity.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will use a five-year, $3.73 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's National center for Advancing Translational Sciences to launch the Center for Virtual Care Value and Equity (ViVE).
The project is one of many across the country aiming to apply new technologies and strategies to an ongoing challenge: Breaking down the barriers to care that impact underserved populations. Those barriers are often called social determinants of health, and can include family, work and transportation issues, cultural pressures, technical literacy, and behavioral health concerns.
A children's hospital in Virginia is integrating digital health technology into its neonatal intensive care unit to improve care management for preterm babies and infants with acute medical conditions.
The partnership between Roanoke-based Carilion Children's Hospital and Astarte Medical will enable NICU staff to access the latter's NICUtrition platform, which analyzes patient feeding practices and outcomes to identify feeding protocol effectiveness, patient risk factors, and best practices that can positively impact patient outcomes.
NICUtrition "is able to reflect both longitudinal and real-time patient feeding and growth metrics that help our care teams make evidence-based decisions," Dena Goldberg, PhD, RDN, a clinical dietitian and neonatal specialist at Carilion Children's Hospital, told HealthLeaders. "Because the platform streamlines data-gathering, we no longer have to collect nutrition and growth outcome data by hand and then use statistical software to analyze it. It's not replacing any jobs but augmenting our teams and reducing the burden placed on resources."
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) is embracing new technology designed to enable clinical trial sponsors to quickly and easily pull relevant patient data from MSK's EHR.
The New York City health system is partnering with IgniteData, a UK-based developer of electronic data transfer solutions, to provide data integration between MSK's EHR platform and the platforms used by two major clinical trial sponsors. The company will deploy its Archer technology through the MSK Innovation Hub.
The goal is to streamline and improve what is often a manual process of pulling and verifying data from sometimes different EHRs to support cancer research, boosting the efficiency of these trials, improving the process for selecting and monitoring participants, and eventually leading to better outcomes.
The technology is designed to enable research staff to quickly transfer regulatory grade data such as vital signs and labs—which typically account for as much as half of the data needed—into the sponsor's study database, reducing data entry errors and source data verification and query resolution times.
Keep on top of evolving tech developments in patient care.
Technology offers numerous opportunities for nurse leaders and their staff to provide better healthcare to their patients.
Advancement in technology allows nurse leaders to schedule staffing more efficiently, improve clinical outcomes, reduce human error, track data, and enhance nurses’ well-being, to name just a few.
These five recent technology stories from HealthLeaders will help nurse leaders keep on top of evolving industry developments in patient care:
With New Jersey’s maternal mortality rate ranking 47th in the nation— with 46.5 deaths per 100,000 live births—First Lady Tammy Murphy launched Nurture NJ to cut that rate in half within five years.
The HTC-Wildflower Health partnership aims to bring digital health resources to bear, addressing key social determinants of health that contribute to these deaths, and create a value-based care program that rewards providers for outcomes.
The bundle includes prenatal and postnatal services and encompasses both the mother and baby and gives providers access to digital health resources, including education, virtual visits, and remote patient monitoring tools.
With so many languages spoken across the country, communication challenges are common, but nowhere is that more dangerous than in a healthcare facility, where an incorrect translation could affect clinical outcomes.
When treating a patient speaking Mandarin, Bengali, or any other language, providers typically look for a multilingual family member, find the nearest staff member who just happened to speak that language, or call the hospital's translation service and hope someone knows that language.
Digital health technology has made that process easier. Care teams can now use a smartphone or tablet to connect through an mHealth app with an interpreter in real time, even by video, on a platform that specializes in translation services. Manhattan Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital (MEETH), for example, uses LanguageLine services on tablets provided by Equiva Health, a digital health patient engagement company.
Digital health tools such as smart bandages and sensors and reporting tools within the EHR that include images can help care teams keep close tabs on wounds and avoid hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs).
Northwell Health has partnered with Pittsburgh-based digital health company Net Health to deploy its Tissue Analytics (TA) software for wound care management. The technology is integrated into the health system's EHR platform to give clinicians more accurate wound data and allow for real-time monitoring.
At Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center on New York’s Long Island, part of the Catholic Health system, accurate and/or progressing wounds that are in question can be better monitored with the technology, according to a wound care specialist there.
Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Florida, is using Moxi, a robot, to help staff and care providers with tasks that might otherwise take up time away from patients, such as transporting equipment and lab samples and even picking up items left for patients at the front desk.
The robot relieves staff from gathering supplies and medication, according to Tammy Daniel, DNP, Baptist Health's senior vice president and chief nursing officer. “Moxi’s support will allow them to focus on people as opposed to tasks, and on what they do best: patient care.”
The adult-sized robot, equipped with a gripper at the end of an arm, uses AI technology and an array of sensors to navigate busy hallways without bumping into objects or people, can maneuver through doors and elevators, and learns as it goes.
More time spent on the electronic health record platform can improve quality outcomes in primary care, though providers still need to make sure they're not overdoing it, according to research out of Brigham and Women's Hospital.
"It is notable that among all metrics of EHR time examined, there was the greatest numerical association between daily time on the in-basket and daily time on clinical review and ambulatory quality outcomes," the study noted. In-basket work is performed in addition to visit-based, revenue-generating work, often outside of scheduled clinic hours.
More time spent on the EHR "may represent a level of thoroughness, attention to detail, or patient and team communication that ultimately enhances certain outcomes," according to the research team. The challenge, then, is to find a balance between spending meaningful time on the EHR and ensuring it isn't negatively affecting care quality or the caregiver's health.
Innovation reaches into every corner of healthcare and nurse leaders need to be well-informed.
Nurses are natural healthcare innovators.
After all, it was nurses at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center who developed a process to work around COVID-19 protocols that severely restricted care management for patients with diabetes.
And a nurse leader is the architect of CommonSpirit's innovative virtual care program that uses videoconferencing technology and dedicated devices in each patient room, allowing the hospital's virtual nurses to assist bedside nurses by monitoring the unit from a remote digital center.
Innovation reaches into every corner of healthcare, so besides their regular duties of overseeing budgets, staffing, and keeping up-to-date on nursing issues, nurse leaders also must stay informed of innovations that can affect the organization's bigger picture.
These five innovation stories from HealthLeaders editors will help nurse leaders keep on top of the newest in industry developments:
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have developed a smartphone app for AI voice analysis that is able to accurately predict which patients have clogged arteries, which can cause heart attacks.
The study builds on earlier work that had identified vocal biomarker components in voice samples.
Researchers found that a patient with a high voice biomarker score was 2.6 times more likely to suffer major problems associated with coronary artery disease (CAD) and three times more likely to show evidence of plaque buildup. It reportedly is the first study of its kind to use voice analysis technology to predict CAD outcomes.
Researchers haven’t determined why certain vocal features indicate a prevalence for CAD, but they’re looking closely at the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the voice box, many parts of the cardiovascular system and other bodily functions that aren’t under conscious control.
“We’re not suggesting that voice analysis technology would replace doctors or replace existing methods of health care delivery," said Jaskanwal Deep Singh Sara, MD, a cardiology fellow who led the researchers, "but we think there’s a huge opportunity for voice technology to act as an adjunct to existing strategies."
The Mayo Clinic's dive into AI includes the launch of an incubator for AI platforms, joining a growing number of health systems looking to develop innovative home-grown services.
Researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine are creating a “digital twin” that would replace the patient during tests and treatments.
Called the MLBox, it would use digital health wearables and smart devices in the home to collect biological, clinical, behavioral, and environmental data on a patient, and then create a model that could be used to test out new treatments before they’re tried on the patient.
The project initially will focus on treatments for sleep issues, such as sleep apnea, and their link to serious health concerns such as dementia and heart disease.
"With the capacity to discover everything we can about the individual, we can change the relationship between people and their health," researchers said.
The idea is to create a model that will stand in for the patient, allowing care providers to study how a certain drug or treatment works without putting the patient through any stress or danger. For example, it would allow doctors to identify and design a treatment for a specific type of allergy without needing to run the patient through a battery of tests to identify to what the patient is allergic.
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai have created an AI tool that may help care providers predict a patient's chances of having a heart attack over the next five years.
The algorithm analyzes the amount and composition of plaque in arteries that supply blood to the heart to determine heart attack risk. In the 11-site, international SCOT-HEART study involving almost 1,611 patients from 2010 to 2019, the tool offered "excellent or good agreement" with expert reader measurements and intravascular ultrasound.
“Coronary plaque is often not measured because there is not a fully automated way to do it,” Damini Dey, PhD, director of the quantitative image analysis lab in the Biomedical Imaging Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai and senior author of the study, recently published in The Lancet, said in a press release issued by Cedars-Sinai. “When it is measured, it takes an expert at least 25 to 30 minutes, but now we can use this program to quantify plaque from CTA images in five to six seconds.”
Dey and her colleagues designed an algorithm that outlines coronary arteries in 3D images, then identifies the blood and plaque deposits within them.
They found that the measurements corresponded with plaque amounts seen in coronary CTAs, and also matched results with images taken by intravascular ultrasound and catheter-based coronary angiography—two invasive tests considered to be highly accurate in assessing coronary artery plaque.
With a surge in virtual care caused by the pandemic and a growing population of limited English proficiency (LEP) patients, clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital launched new protocols to make sure the Boston-based health center was reaching people who needed to be reached.
Aswita Tan-McGrory, MBA, MSPH, director of the Disparities Solutions Center and administrative director of the Mongan Institute at MGH, and her colleagues outlined those three strategies in a recent article in the American Journal of Managed Care.
First, the team identified the five top languages spoken by MGH’s patient population and launched a targeted campaign in multiple languages aimed at reaching people with limited technology and health literacy.
The health system made 43 Amazon Fire tablets available through an affiliated community health center to patients with LEP and technology barriers, and taught participants how to use the tablet to access healthcare resources.
Second, to address privacy concerns, MGH created a script that described how the health system protects information through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and under what circumstances patient information can be shared. They also created cards in multiple languages outlining rights and protection of immigrants under the US Constitution and identified a need to educate clinicians about whether and how to ask patients and family members about their immigration status.
Third, MGH partnered with Doximity to develop a browser-based platform, one that doesn’t require the user to download an app, that can create customized text messages in different languages and initiate a video visit. That platform can also be used to link in medical interpreters, either in advance or on demand.
For people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD), a trip to the doctor's office or dentist poses unique challenges for both patient and provider. Now, however, an Ohio nonprofit has developed a health center specially designed to provide those services.
I Am Boundless, based in Columbus, has opened Boundless Health, a facility modeled on the federally qualified health center (FQHC) platform that offers a wide range of healthcare services, including primary and specialty care, behavioral health services, and dentistry, for the I/DD population and their caregivers.
Healthcare providers "are not trained to provide care for these people, and the healthcare system is not built for this," says Patrick Maynard, PhD, the organization's president and CEO. "I have a board member with a 38-year-old daughter who is still seeing her pediatrician."
Studies have found that patients with I/DD and other complex needs are almost twice as likely to be hospitalized than the general population and are prescribed four times as many medications, Maynard says.
A clinic that caters specifically to the I/DD population, with care providers trained to treat these patients, "represents a big piece of the pie that has always been missing," he says.
The center operates on a strategy of offering whole-person care, integrating services that patient and their families might have a difficult time accessing elsewhere.
