Providence Health & Services was committed. System leaders knew monitoring and resolving patient problems in real time was the best way to raise its patient satisfaction scores.
They had also determined that daily patient rounding by senior executives or nurse leaders was the best way to accomplish that goal. But they needed a technology that facilitated analysis of patient complaints and enabled problem solving without adding another layer of burdensome data collection and input tasks.
They also needed a technology adaptable to a large, multi-state system with 32 hospitals, whose leaders desperately wanted to avoid the so-called popcorn effect, where the system's many institutions wind up trying to solve common problems in multiple ways.
After examining CipherHealth's patient monitoring technology during a “Shark Tank”-like competition, Providence chose the company's Orchid platform. System officials say it had the advantage of being customizable and device-agnostic, which allowed the application become the standard for the entire system.
Orchid “was accepted with open arms, and one of the nurse leaders summed it up best—it actually worked right out of the box, and that does not happen very often, especially with healthcare technology,” said Nancy Yates, chief nurse informatics officer at Providence Health & Services.
The first site went live with the digital rounding software in January of this year. It served as a proof-of-concept. Providence has since set up 15 sites, meaning almost half of all hospitals in the health system will soon be running Orchid.