Each health system is a unique enterprise with its own mission, locale and payer mix. However, many of hospitals’ biggest challenges remain the same throughout the sector — low reimbursement rates, proliferating cyberattacks and of course, a sweeping workforce shortage.
The workforce shortage is especially acute among nurses. There are 193,100 projected job openings per year for nurses in the U.S. between 2022 and 2032, but only 177,400 new nurses are predicted to enter the workforce during that entire 10-year period. That isn’t even enough to fill one year’s worth of the projected job openings.
In order for this issue to improve, hospitals must embrace the technology on the market that has been proven to alleviate nurse burnout, said Syl Trepanier, chief nursing officer at Providence, in a recent interview at the ViVE conference in Los Angeles.
“Things are better than they were two or three years ago, but they’re not great. And my sense is that they’re not going to get better than where they are right now unless we start doing some things drastically differently,” he declared.
Trepanier noted that he began his nursing career more than three decades ago. During that time, he witnessed technology transform the way people worked in virtually every industry but his own. Nurses basically still work “the same way they did 35 years ago,” Trepanier remarked, noting that there is “something fundamentally wrong” about that reality.
To really solve the nursing shortage crisis, healthcare leaders need to work quickly to change models of care, he pointed out.
“We can’t practice the same way anymore. With the models that we have right now, we are very heavily reliant on registered nurses. We say we work as a team, but we really don’t. It’s pretty much an individualized sport. Now is the time to embrace the whole healthcare team and work very, very differently,” Trepanier explained.
He named three technology tools, all of which are widely available on the market today, that hospital leaders should seriously consider adopting. To Trepanier, all these tools are doing a good job of transforming nurses’ workflows for the better.
- Robots: Many hospitals are utilizing robots, such as those made by Aethon or SoftBank Robotics, to reduce nurse burnout and allow them to focus on spending time with patients rather than mundane tasks. Robots can perform a variety of tasks for nurses, such as delivering medication, disinfecting hospital rooms and transporting supplies. These tasks are simple but time-consuming — using robots to complete them boosts efficiency, reduces the physical strain on nurses and helps restore joy back into their daily work, Trepanier said.
- Wearable monitors: Several companies, such as Masimo or Philips, manufacture wearable devices that continuously monitor hospital patients’ vital signs while embedding that data into the EHR. In Trepanier’s view, all hospitals need to embrace this type of technology. He said it’s “kind of crazy” that millions of Americans walk around with a watch that can measure their vital signs, but that when someone comes into a hospital, “it all has to be done manually.”
- Virtual nursing: Virtual nursing mainly refers to nursing care provided via video, audio or messaging. This enables nurses to manage patient needs more efficiently by working from a centralized station. Decreasing the need for constant physical presence at the bedside is a major factor when it comes to reducing nurses’ levels of stress and physical pain, Trepanier noted. Care.ai, Teladoc and Artisight are examples of vendors who sell virtual nursing software.
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