A pilot program between Conduit Health Partners and Nurse Disrupted aims to solve challenges faced during the hospital admissions process. Read about the collaboration and how it has the potential to positively impact nurse and patient satisfaction.
Opportunity:
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing projects that the nursing shortage will continue through 2031. The shortage costs hospitals hundreds of millions of dollars for a workforce that is already stressed, frustrated and exhausted.
At Conduit Health Partners, we are constantly looking at ways to develop new and innovative solutions to improve access to care for all populations. Conduit seeks to improve nurse job satisfaction and retention, all while reducing hospital costs. Streamlining the hospital intake process will give nurses more time to care for patients, leading to better outcomes. Conduit’s virtual care services augment care delivery in a variety of care settings, helping clients deliver safe, quality care beyond traditional settings. These results will also contribute to advancing the profile of the nursing profession and help reduce the nursing shortage.
The Need:
Nurses need more time to provide bedside care and find more joy in their profession. To admit a patient to a hospital unit, busy, multitasking nurses must set aside their bedside care to juggle yet another task.
Bon Secours Southside Medical Center, a 300-bed hospital in Richmond, Virginia, has a Care Innovation Unit that is part of Bon Secours Mercy Health’s care transformation program.. Nurses lead and staff the unit, creating, designing and scaling processes that enable nurses to work at their highest capacity. Their solutions aim to provide patients with the best clinical outcomes, allow nurses to spend more time at patient bedsides, create efficiencies in care delivery and improve the overall patient experience.
The Solution:
Conduit Health Partners is a health care solutions company using innovation to improve access to and delivery of care.
Using an easy-to-use mobile platform developed by Nurse Disrupted, Conduit’s virtual nurses manage the patient admissions intake process for a pilot program at a large urban hospital. They work as a true extension of the hospital’s bedside nurses but focus on admission protocols. These virtual nurses confer one-to-one with the on-site nurse to complete patient admissions and create appropriate care plans.
By introducing the inpatient virtual nurse, Southside Medical Center streamlined the admissions process and allowed the on-site nursing team to devote more bedside time to other patients in their care.
Results:
“Our goals for this program were to increase satisfaction scores for bedside and virtual nurses as well as patients,” said Cheryl Dalton-Norman, president of Conduit Health Partners. “We also aimed to close the gap from boarding to admit. When patients have to wait for hours before being admitted to a hospital, it shows that the administrative and care delivery systems aren’t working efficiently.” Patient and nursing satisfaction drops, and the cost of care goes up.
Initial findings suggest the virtual inpatient nursing solution solves many of these challenges.
The future is here. “This successful pilot gave us a glimpse into the art of the possible,” said Ramona Cheek, vice president of care transformation at Bon Secours Mercy Health.
The virtual nurses give on-site nursing teams more time to engage in their passions – bedside care.
About Conduit Health Partners
Conduit Health Partners is an outsource partner that offers customized health care solutions for health systems, health plans, employers, and others to improve care and access for their patients and employees. Led by a team of health care professionals, Conduit offers customized, cost-effective and time-saving solutions. Since its founding in 2017, Conduit Health Partners has experienced extraordinary growth, rapidly expanding its reach from caring for 22,000 people in 2017 to 1.3 million people in 2022.