Cleveland-based University Hospitals is partnering with Aidoc to help radiologists screen CT scans and make care delivery more efficient
Clinicians dread the missed spot on a CT scan or X-ray that leads to a serious health concern. Now health systems are using AI to make sure those mistakes don’t happen.
University Hospitals recently announced a partnership with AIdoc to deploy the company’s aiOS platform across all 13 hospitals and dozens of outpatient facilities in the Cleveland-based health system. The technology aims to assist clinicians by giving them another tool to analyze images.
‘[We’re] looking to see if we’re finding things that we would have otherwise not seen,” says Donna Plecha, MD, the health system’s Chair of Radiology. “We work with AI – it is not replacing our reads. And I think most studies that look at AI with a radiologist, that combination usually does better than either one by itself.”
The distinction—is AI artificial or augmented intelligence?—encapsulates both the promise and the peril of the technology, which has drawn comparisons for its effect on healthcare to both the printing press and the Terminator. Advocates say AI will work best as a tool that clinicians can use to improve their work and their workflows, rather than a replacement for a doctor or nurse.
Plecha notes the difference, saying clinicians will always be reviewing AI output for accuracy. She says the presence of false negatives and false positives in early AI results supported that position.
“I think they’re realizing how careful they have to be and not believing everything that AI is marking,” she says.
As for the potential, UH officials point to the opportunity for AI to pick up on infinitesimal aspects of a CT scan or X-ray that might bypass the naked eye. That tiny spot could be a sign of a pulmonary embolism, aortic dissection, vertebral compression fracture, or pneumothorax. Identifying those and other acute health concerns early means the patient is moved more quickly to the appropriate care provider and treated more quickly and efficiently.
“The technology identifies both expected and unexpected findings, helps physicians prioritize urgent cases, and ensures all flagged conditions are reviewed by the care team,” the health system said in a press release announcing the partnership.
Plecha says the health system will review all the data collected by the AI platform for accuracy and outcomes before expanding the platform to other departments and use cases. That review process will also help clinicians better understand how to use AI and what to look for.
Aside from improving accuracy and care team efficiency, Plecha says the tool will also help University Hospitals make the most out of its limited supply of radiologists, addressing workforce shortages that are plaguing health systems and hospitals across the country. It will, she says, enable radiologists 9and, eventually, other clinicians) to work with more confidence and at the top of their license.
The idea of using AI to improve workflows isn’t new. Texas-based CHRISTUS Health, in announcing a partnership this week with Abridge to implement a clinician conversation tool, noted the effect on “cognitive load,” or the amount of mental effort needed to complete a task.
According to CHRISTUS officials, the AI tool helped reduce physician burnout by some 78% during a pilot earlier this year. With the AI tool, they said, physicians were under less stress and were able to perform their task better and more efficiently.
“I feel much less distracted with patients since I can focus on the conversation and history without pausing to take extensive notes or re-ask questions I missed during notetaking,” Myriah Willborn, MD, a family medicine doctor at the CHRISTUS Trinity Clinic in Corpus Christi, said in a statement issued by the health system.
The concern, of course, is that clinicians become too reliant on the technology, expecting it to be perfect and catch anything they miss. That’s where continuous review comes into play, along with the understanding that clinicians always have the final say in care and are using AI only as a tool to improve their decision-making.
To that end, Plecha says she sees a future where AI not only reads an image, but combs through all other information databases, from the EHR to other tests and exams, even outside sources reflecting social determinants of health, to form a more complete picture of the patient and recommend diagnoses and other treatments.
“In the future it’s going to be impossible to be a radiologist and not use AI,” she says.
The founder and CEO of a medical device company has been convicted of selling an implantable medical device to providers that didn't work at all—and then creating a replacement part that was also fake.
Healthcare executives looking to embrace the latest in implantable technology for patient care need to make sure their vendor partners are trustworthy.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in southern New York has secured a six-year prison sentence for the founder and CEO of a medical device company that sold a fake neurostimulator to healthcare providers and instructed them to bill insurers, including Medicare, for thousands of dollars in reimbursements. The device contained a plastic part that was purposefully too long, forcing providers to spend thousands of dollars to buy a replacement plastic part from the company that still didn’t work.
Laura Perryman, 55, of Delray Beach, Florida, founder and CEO of Stimwave, was sentenced to six years in prison and three years of supervised release by U.S. District Court Judge Denise L. Cote for healthcare fraud and conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and wire fraud following a two-week trial.
“Laura Perryman callously created a dummy medical device component and told doctors to implant it into patients,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a press release. “She did this out of greed, so doctors could bill Medicare and private insurance companies approximately $18,000 for each implantation of that dummy component and so she could entice doctors to buy her device for many thousands of dollars.”
“Perryman breached the trust of the doctors who bought her medical device, and more importantly, the patients who were implanted with that piece of plastic,” Williams continued. “This prosecution and today’s sentence are part of this Office’s ongoing work in combating fraud in the healthcare system and protecting patients from being exploited for money.”
According to the press release, Stimwave created and marketed an implantable neurostimulation device called the StimQ PNS System, which was supposed to treat chronic pain by stimulating certain peripheral nerves via an electric current. The device featured a so-called Pink Stylet, which was implanted in the patient to receive the electric impulses from another part, called the Lead.
Law enforcement officials said Stimwave sold the device to providers roughly between 2017 and 2020 for about $16,000 and told them they could bill insurers through two separate reimbursement codes for as much as $24,000.
Soon after receiving the device, providers told the company the Pink Stylet was too long to be safely implanted in patients. After a while, Stimwave—which didn’t lower the price of the device or alert providers to the problem—created a White Stylet as a replacement and sold it to providers for another $16,000.
“Perryman directed that Stimwave create the White Stylet — a dummy component made entirely of plastic, but which Perryman misrepresented to doctors as a receiver alternative to the Pink Stylet,” the press release stated. “The White Stylet could be cut to size by the doctor for use in smaller anatomical spaces and was created solely so that doctors and medical providers would continue to purchase the device for use in those scenarios and continue to bill for the implantation of a receiver component.”
According to law enforcement officials, Perryman oversaw training for doctors in how to use the device and also told others in her company to vouch for its effectiveness.
The lesson learned is that healthcare providers should do due diligence on vendors offering the latest medical devices with promises of improved clinical outcomes. And remember that plastic does not conduct electric currents.
Healthcare transformation is an evolving strategy. Some say a slow-but-steady approach works. Others—not so much.
Healthcare transformation is all the rage on the conference circuit these days, but are health systems and hospitals really transforming anything?
The litany of pain points within healthcare is long, from workforce shortages to soaring costs to ineffective outcomes. To address those issues, healthcare executives are looking at new technology like AI and virtual care. Some are looking for small, incremental gains, while others say the entire care delivery system has to change.
But Arthur Gianelli, MA, MBA, MPH, FACHE, chief transformation officer for New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, points out that technology may have caused just as much harm as good. For example, he says, EHRs transformed the healthcare industry “the wrong way.”
During a HealthIMPACT Forum this past week in New York City, Gianelli said the EHR is a great tool for collecting information, “but right now it has made the lives of our practitioners demonstrably worse.” Clinicians, he says, now spend as much time in front of computers as they do in front of their patients.
As a result, the industry sees transformation as a return to the past, when patient and clinician faced each other and talked about health.
That said, technology has the potential to improve healthcare—if executives know how to use it. And that comes with practice.
“You want people to try, to experiment, to potentially fail and to try again,” he said.
What’s the fix? Call your baby ugly.
Sachin Jain, MD, MBA, FACP, thinks healthcare hasn’t done enough yet to transform—and it’ll take a lot more pain and suffering to move the industry in the right director.
Jain, president and CEO of the SCAN Group and Health Plan and a long-standing voice in the healthcare field, is critical of efforts by health systems and hospitals to enact change because, he says, they haven’t really changed anything yet.
“Why have we made changing healthcare harder than putting a man on the moon?” he asked.
In a colorful appearance by video at the HealthIMPACT Forum, Jain said the industry has “normalized the abnormal” and put the wrong people in charge of care, creating a generation of people trained not to ask the tough questions—such as, why is healthcare having such a hard time defining value-based care?
It’s a question many healthcare innovation leaders are asking as disruptors like Walmart, Walgreens, and CVS Health all struggle with their primary care strategies. The popular response to this has been “Healthcare is hard,” but why is it hard? Have years and years of pay-for-procedure and episodic healthcare clouded the playing field so much that healthcare executives can’t understand what constitutes value?
Jain argued that healthcare leaders have to get serious about change, to the point of shutting down programs that aren’t working and enduring declining revenues and job losses. But healthcare, he said, has a very hard time shutting down anything.
“You can’t change without changing,” he said. “It starts by calling our baby ugly, and that’s really, really hard to do because it’s our baby.”
Jain likens AI to the printing press in its potential to transform an industry but says healthcare leaders have to ask the tough questions now, cutting programs and positions that aren’t working.
“When people talk about workforce strategies, a lot of times it’s because you have a [horrible] workforce,” he said, using a NSFW phrase.
To Gianelli, that means moving away from the same old conversations about financial benefits and looking more closely at what healthcare should be doing: Making people healthier. AI could do that, he says, and it could also “change the types of people that we actually need in the organization.”
He described transformation as a culture, rather than a strategy, and said healthcare organizations need to enact change not in the boardroom, but on the floor. That means pulling nurses, doctors, and patients into the conversation.
“Clinicians in a hospital attach to purpose,” he said, emphasizing the idea that everyone needs to be on the same page to enact change.
Jain said that will be tough.
“We’ve eroded people’s purpose,” Jain added. “And we’ve tried to solve the problem by giving doctors tchotchkes on recognition day.”
Healthcare organizations have to look beyond the money and focus on culture and innovation to bolster the workforce, said panelists at this week’s HealthIMPACT Forum
To take on workforce shortages across the enterprise, healthcare organizations have to be innovative. And that means looking past the money.
“We can’t get into a bidding war,” said Kirk Larson, Aspirus Health’s Chief Technology Officer, noting the Wisconsin-based health system can’t match IT salaries offered by the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple.
And it’s not just IT talent that health systems are struggling to find. Mike Mosquito, CHCIO, MBA, PMP, CDH-E, who heads emerging technology & innovation special projects for the Northeast Georgia Health System, said he has to be creative to draw doctors and nurses from the more affluent Atlanta area to the south.
The two healthcare executives were part of a panel titled “Solving Your Clinical Talent Shortage” at this week’s HealthIMPACT Forum in New York City. Their discussion hit on a topic familiar to every health system and hospital: Trying to keep the employees you have and create an environment to attract new employees.
The challenge lies in making healthcare an attractive career decision beyond the thorny issue of pay. And that means adding perks that appeal to employees seeking a better work-life balance and a good work environment, such as work-from-home opportunities, child and senior care benefits, and of course better workflows.
Healthcare innovation plays a significant role in that strategy. Health systems and hospitals are using virtual care and digital health tools to improve those workflows, aiming to reduce stress and burnout in the workforce and enable doctors and nurses to work at the top of their license—in other words, in front of patients rather than in front of a computer. Some health systems are using virtual care as a hiring perk, with the idea that clinicians can on occasion work from home and senior staff can virtually mentor young recruits and work from a desktop in a telemedicine command center.
Just as important, the panelists said, are collaborations between healthcare organizations and academic institutions. At the college level, health systems need to actively support healthcare curricula and create opportunities for students to experience what they’re studying to become, from job-shadowing to internships.
That effort should extend into high school as well.
“Help [students] understand where the jobs are,” said Larson, referencing programs that highlight the culture and responsibility of the healthcare industry and the opportunities to apply for positions that are open. He and the other panelists also suggested an easier process for students to apply for jobs—like a blue button for healthcare.
“Don’t always have a money grab,” added Mosquito, noting that some of the coolest, most innovative technology—like robots—is also being used in healthcare.
The panel, which included Sandra Bossi, Senior Director of Clinical Operations Administration at LiveOnNY and moderator Shahid Shah, chairman of the HealthIMPACT Forum, stressed that healthcare organizations need to “speak the language” of today’s emerging workforce.
“You’ve got to attract the kids [and help them to see] this is the path for you,” Mosquito said. “Not everyone’s going to be a TikTok millionaire.”
The University of South Carolina is launching a remote patient monitoring program aimed at reducing the state’s high maternal mortality rate of 32.7 deaths per 100,000 births
The University of South Carolina is launching a remote patient monitoring program aimed to improve care management for new mothers and their children.
The university is partnering with digital health company Rimidi to launch the program through an affiliated multispecialty clinic. Funded by The Duke Endowment, the platform will help care providers monitor blood pressure for patients in underserved communities following a high-risk pregnancy.
“Our partnership with Rimidi aims to address a critical maternal health challenge in South Carolina – reducing complications from postpartum hypertension,” Nansi Boghossian, an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina who is spearheading the RPM program, said in a press release. “Through this collaboration, we are committed to improving patient care and enhancing the health of mothers in underserved communities.”
The program aims to tackle South Carolina’s high maternal mortality rate, which a recent report put at 32.7 maternal deaths per 100,000 births, by addressing key health concerns like preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, and chronic hypertension. That’s a high rate in a country whose 2022 maternal mortality rate of 22.3 deaths per 100,000 live births is one of the worst of all developed nations.
Through the health system’s Epic EHR, care teams will focus on metrics like blood pressure ascertainment during the first six weeks postpartum, in-person postpartum visit attendance, hospital readmissions through 12 months postpartum, program acceptability, retention, satisfaction, and cost-effectiveness.
RPM platforms give care providers an opportunity to monitor patients after they leave the hospital, clinic, or doctor’s office. By using connected devices to gather data from patients at home, they can spot trends, adjust care management plans, and even intervene if a patient is showing signs of developing a serious health concern.
A new study aims to replace BMI with BRI, giving care providers a better way to measure a patient’s fat content
Could a new measurement of obesity replace BMI and give healthcare providers a more accurate representation of their patients’ weight issues?
A new study published this month in JAMA, co-authored by researchers from China and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, makes the argument for what is called the body roundness index, or BRI. Whereas BMI, or body mass index, measures a person’s height and weight, BRI adds in waist circumference to gain a better understanding of where fat is distributed on the body.
The difference could affect how providers develop innovative programs to address obesity and other weight-related health concerns. With a better idea of how a body is proportioned and where fat is located, providers can develop better treatments and gain a better idea of those programs’ effectiveness.
It’s a key element to care management at a time when obesity and weight-related issues are a popular topic of conversation. From the effect that weight has on chronic diseases like diabetes, asthma, and heart disease to the popularity of Ozempic and Wegovy, both consumers and their care providers are keenly interested in how to address excess body fat.
BMI has been considered the standard for body fat measurement since the 1980s, but critics have long questioned whether it’s an accurate assessment, since it doesn’t take into account organs, bone, muscle and water. The JAMA study takes this one step further, arguing that providers need a better measurement “to decipher population-based characteristics and potential association with mortality risk.”
“Besides weight and height, BRI additionally considers waist circumference, and hence it can more comprehensively reflect visceral fat distribution,” the study’s authors note. “BRI was found to be superior over other anthropometric indicators in estimating the risk for various clinical end points, including cardiometabolic disease, kidney disease, and cancer. Furthermore, longitudinal studies have shown that high BRI was associated with the significantly increased risk of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease-specific mortality.”
The study, using data from almost 33,000 U.S. adults taken from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and NHANES Linked Mortality File, compared a person’s all-cause mortality risk based on BMI and BRI, and found BRI to be more accurate. This was especially true for muscular people and the elderly, who tend to have inaccurate BMI measurements because of their body shape.
Those findings, the authors said, “provide compelling evidence for the application of BRI as a noninvasive and easy to obtain screening tool for estimation of mortality risk and identification of high-risk individuals, a novel concept that could be incorporated into public health practice pending consistent validation in other independent studies.”
A report issued earlier this year by the Bipartisan Policy Center offers a blueprint for expanding remote patient monitoring opportunities and coverage
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) has the potential to improve clinical outcomes by giving providers the ability to improve care management outside the hospital or doctor’s office, but its growth is being stymied by low reimbursement.
A report released earlier this year by the Bipartisan Policy Center gives the government and the healthcare industry a blueprint to address that roadblock.
While RPM has seen tremendous growth coming out of the pandemic, its future is in question. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) offers only a handful of CPT codes for remote physiological monitoring and remote therapeutic monitoring, enabling care providers to recoup, according to one study, as much as $170 per patient per month from Medicare. To make matters worse, the American Medical Association’s CPT Editorial Panel, which governs CPT codes, has hit a roadblock on new codes that would expand reimbursement opportunities.
The reimbursement issue could prompt healthcare organizations to avoid launching or expanding RPM programs, figuring the effort to support the program is too much for the amount of money that would come back in.
To improve the playing field, the Bipartisan Policy Center report lists five recommendations for service coverage:
CMS should work with medical specialty societies to evaluate the evidence and determine appropriate coverage mechanisms to guide the optimal use of RPM, including for which patients and over what duration. This work could include collaborating with Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) or issuing National Coverage Determinations (NCDs).
As more evidence emerges about the appropriate use of RPM devices, the Health and Human Services Secretary should recommend a diverse set of billing codes so providers have more options for the time they spend on the data and the number of minimum days of data required.
CMS should clarify current policies regarding appropriate coding and billing of RPM and RTM. It should also require providers not enrolled in risk-based models to attest to medical necessity for patients’ continued use of remote monitoring—at a frequency deemed appropriate by the HHS secretary and based on condition-specific clinical guidelines.
CMS should work with the AMA and relevant medical specialty societies to develop additional RTM billing codes to allow for use cases beyond musculoskeletal, respiratory, and cognitive behavioral therapy—as the evidence supports.
Congress should request the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) to report on the impact of remote monitoring on clinical outcomes and cost by disease state, and on any new billing thresholds or code durations, at least every three years.
The goal of these recommendations is to move the needle forward on RPM and give more healthcare organizations—especially smaller hospitals and health systems with limited resources and those working with underserved populations—a chance to expand their reach.
At the HealthLeaders Virtual Nursing Mastermind event this week in Atlanta, healthcare leaders discussed the KPIs they're measuring to prove ROI.
Healthcare executives are embracing innovative ideas like virtual care to stabilize a shrinking nursing workforce and boost clinical outcomes, but they need to know what to measure to prove ROI.
Virtual nursing programs are becoming popular in health systems across the country, either as a stand-alone program or, more commonly, as one part of a more comprehensive reimagining of care. And while each health system or hospital is advancing its own strategy, there are common objectives, such as nursing turnover and well-being, administrative tasks, and patient engagement.
Executives from a dozen health systems met in Atlanta this week for the HealthLeaders Virtual Nursing Mastermind program, in a forum to establish common goals, challenges, and successes. The program, which included three virtual roundtables, established a number of key metrics that executives are focusing on as they evaluate their virtual nursing strategies.
Staff turnover and well-being. The initial impetus for many health systems in launching virtual nursing programs is to address a shrinking workforce. Nursing executives are looking for ways to not only reduce turnover, but improve the environment so that nurses want to stay (and others want to join in). Virtual nursing programs create new opportunities for the workforce while revising workloads so that floor nurses are doing less administrative work and spending more time doing what they trained to do: spend time with patients.
While the trurnover rate is a key metric, others include nurse satisfaction (measured in surveys) and time spent on the computer, usually tracked through the EHR platform. While these metrics often are difficult to translate into dollars, Clair Lunt, RN, DHSc, Senior Director of Nursing Informatics at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, noted they’re seeing a decline in the use of travel nurses and overtime, as well as PTO and even sick time (such as so-called mental health days), all of which significantly affect the bottom line.
The results aren’t limited to nurses, either. Providence is one of seeing a reduction in all-staff turnover, according to Sherene Schlegel, RN, BSN, COO and CNO of Virtual Care and Digital Health. These programs can thus impact all members of the care team, including CNAs and physicians.
As these programs involve, the executives in the Mastermind class noted that virtual nursing can be used as a marketing tool to attract new talent, especially as programs grow to include work-at-home policies.
Patient satisfaction. With the industry’s gradual shift to value-based care, health systems are placing more emphasis on patient experience—and a virtual nursing program can have a profound impact on how a patient feels about the care they receive. Most health systems see these effects in their HCAHPS scores, and some are even tailoring patient surveys to include specific questions on patient interactions with nurses.
It's important to remember that patient satisfaction and engagement do factor into an effective care management plan. Engaged patients are more likely to communicate freely with their nurses, listen to their care teams and adhere to those plans—something that can be measured in medication adherence.
To see those high patient satisfaction scores, health systems need to make sure patients are comfortable with virtual care, including the idea of having a camera in the room, trained on them. Mastermind participants recommended engaging with the patients as soon as they’re settled in their rooms to explain the technology and its uses, as well as designing the technology so that patients know when the camera is off.
Sara Pletcher, MD, MHCDS, SVP and Executive Medical Director of Strategic Innovation at Houston Methodist, pointed out that patients need to understand that virtual care is a routine standard of care, and not an add-on or a luxury. She noted that Houston Methodist now includes virtual care monitoring as part of its consent form, rather than as a separate opt-out.
Patient Throughput. Many health systems are embracing virtual nursing to address patient admission and discharge times, and consequently patient length of stay, all key metrics. But those processes are often complex, involving more than just nurses.
Emily Warr, Administrator of the Center for Telehealth at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), noted that patient discharge is a key pain point in healthcare, one that affects patient satisfaction as well as clinical outcomes, and health systems like Intermountain have a benchmark of three hours from the time a discharge notice is entered to when the patient leaves the hospital. A virtual nursing program is then designed to reduce that time by having a virtual nurse handle as much of the administrative details as possible, including patient education, while the floor nurse manages in-person care duties.
The upshot is that a virtual nurse can oversee those details that a floor nurse would have had to do, reducing time spent and helping the patient get home faster. The same could be said for getting a patient settled into his or her hospital room, with the virtual nurse handling data entry and the floor nurse making sure the patient is comfortable. Both of those processes, as well as any data entry during the patient’s stay, contribute to the overall PLOS.
Again, healthcare executives need to understand that these metrics involve much more than just the nursing department, and that one aspect like virtual nursing won’t necessarily move the needle to a large degree. But incremental improvements are just as important, and for health systems engaged in a redesign of the entire care process, this is one vital step in that evolution.
Administrative tasks. Aside from handling admission and discharge processes, a virtual nursing program can also take on most, if not all, tasks which involve putting a floor nurse in front of a computer (a pain point noted in nurse well-being measurements). This could range from virtual rounding to physician visits to surveys for ancillary programs like sepsis detection, wound care, or medication adherence.
Health system executives can measure success here in accuracy of data entry, or in time taken to complete a task. Some executives have noted that floor nurses are often so busy they fail to do all the data entry and paperwork they should be doing. The end result is that care management is more efficient, and in turn leads to better outcomes.
Additionally, in a separate interview, Warr noted that after a while, floor nurses and virtual nurses in their program were so adept at working together that they could handle tasks without stopping to let the other person know. They also felt comfortable jumping in when needed and helping each other with tasks.
A key to success here is the relationship between the virtual nurse and the floor nurse. Health systems must establish clear protocols for both nurses before launching a program, so that each nurse knows their responsibilities. A good collaboration will be seen in efficient documentation, timely care delivery, and nurse satisfaction.
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The new simulation lab will use new technologies and interactive labs to train healthcare workers on care management for pregnant women and their children
The Stanford Medicine Children’s Health Simulation Innovation Center will use AR, digital health-enabled mannequins, and other tools and technology to give healthcare workers a more hands-on education on a wide variety of health concerns, from difficult births to neonatal care.
“The Innovation Center is … a tool for enhancing care delivery, research, and quality improvement initiatives,” Kristine Taylor, DNP, executive director of the Innovation Center and Center for Professional Excellence and Inquiry, said in a press release. “By analyzing simulation data and outcomes, healthcare teams can identify areas for improvement and implement evidence-based practices to enhance patient care.”
The 4,900-square-foot center is one of several innovative projects being launched across the country to address the nation’s high maternal mortality rate and significant care gaps in children’s health. The maternal mortality rate in 2022 was 22.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; that’s down compared with 32.9 per 100,000 in 2021, during the height of the pandemic, but still high compared to other developed nations.
Healthcare leaders at Stanford Children’s say the new center and technology will help train healthcare workers of all levels, even social workers, in an interactive learning environment that includes debriefing rooms, where they can go over what they’ve learned and discuss new ways of delivering care.
“We are able to enhance our critical thinking, decision-making, and communication skills, ultimately improving patient care outcomes without putting actual patients at risk,” Emily Tomich, RN, a triage nurse and labor and delivery nurse educator, said in the press release. “This is especially important in high-stress situations where clear communication is critical, from basic procedures to complex surgical techniques.”
Gerard Phillips, the health system’s Senior Director of Nursing, explains in this week’s HealthLeaders podcast how UCSD Health is improving patient safety--and where they expect to use the technology next
UC San Diego Health has avoided more than $10 million in healthcare costs since adding remote video monitoring to its telesitting program in 2012.
In this week’s HealthLeaders podcast, Gerard Phillips, DNP, MBA, RN, the health system’s Senior Director of Nursing, says the bidirectional cameras placed in patient rooms enable specially trained video monitoring technicians to monitor patients and communicate with them around the clock.
The 24/7 monitoring program is designed for patients deemed at risk of falling, wandering, or causing harm to themselves by pulling out attached lines and tubes. The health system now has 30 cart-based cameras stationed across five healthcare sites, monitored by three technicians, who are trained CNAs, at a central video monitoring hub.
Phillips says the program not only has allowed UCSD to “maintain a higher level of safety [for] our patients,” but enabled the health system to use those savings to invest in other areas of the organization.
He also says UCSD envisions using remote video monitoring in a number of areas, including virtual nursing, staff safety and home-based care management. And they’re embedding AI technology into the cameras to help monitors spot visual cues of signs of concern with patients.
Listen to Phillips and learn how the health system is making the most out of its virtual telesiting program here.