When Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH) decided it wanted to improve the patient experience in its hospitals, it zeroed in on digitizing its nurse rounding process.
Improving the patient experience is primary for many health system executives – nearly 50 percent agree that meeting rising consumer expectations is a top priority. Improving the nurse rounding process holds the promise of gaining more satisfied patients, more efficient clinicians, and a boost in Medicare reimbursement.
For nurses at PSJH, rounding is an important quality process. “It makes us aware of potential safety and care issues such as medication management, hand hygiene compliance, and pain management,” said Yvonne Strader, RN, Chief Nursing Officer at Providence St. Mary Medical Center. But manual rounding is an inefficient process for nurses, requiring a pen-and-paper log of patient issues. This process results in inconsistent records and hard-to-analyze data.
PSJH thought there was potential for a digital tool to improve its rounding process. Like many leading health systems, PSJH is looking at digital solutions to enable clinical, financial, and operational improvements. According to a recent survey by AVIA, a health system innovation network, and the American Hospital Association, 75 percent of health system leaders believe that the effective use of digital solutions is essential and critical to long-term growth and competitive differentiation. However, despite that critical need, health systems also report that, on average, it takes 23 months to get from identifying a digital need to scaling a solution.
Through a streamlined three-step process, PSJH worked with AVIA and a cohort of other health systems to select and scale CipherHealth's Orchid digital rounding solution:
Step 1: Strategy: Start with the problem, link to digital, and partner with peers
As a member of the AVIA Innovator Network, PSJH collaborates with more than 20 other leading health systems to solve shared challenges that are ripe for digital solutions. PSJH and three other health systems participated in an AVIA Innovation Cohort, which brings a group of health systems together to together to solve an important challenge, to find a new approach for collecting and acting on patient-facing issues in real time.
Step 2: Planning: Define success and understand the solution market
PSJH worked with innovation and nursing stakeholders across its system to define what they needed from a digital solution. Key criterion included ease of use, actionable data, level of customization, and ability to scale to a broad set of users. Using AVIA's due diligence, PSJH came to a quick decision about the best digital rounding solution for their system. Through this process, PSJH saved time and resources and minimized risk by collaborating with other health system leaders.
Step 3: Action: Select a solution, measure results, and scale
PSJH chose CipherHealth's Orchid tool because it had an intuitive user interface with easy to identify issues and instructions, as well as a longitudinal view of patient data. By implementing Orchid, PSJH saved 30 minutes a day in nurse leader time and increased its Medicare hospital consumer assessment (HCAHPS) scores. “For hospitals that have gone live, we've seen a huge uptick in the number of rounds performed, and when slippage does occur, it creates awareness and soon the metric goes back up,” said Peg Currie, RN, Chief Nursing Officer for PSJH's eastern region. “We now have a tool to drive accountability, consistency, and process to get the outcomes we want.”
Within 30 days, PSJH decided to use Orchid for its rounding challenge and was able to scale the tool to a new hospital within its system every two weeks. Nancy Yates, PSJH's Chief Nurse Informatics Officer, said that PSJH's broad buy-in on improving rounding contributed to its speedy implementation. “[Orchid] was accepted with open arms, and one of the nurse leaders summed it up best — it worked right out of the box, and that does not happen very often, especially with healthcare technology.”
To learn more about how Providence St. Joseph Health worked with AVIA and other leading health systems to scale digital innovation, visit aviahealthinnovation.com.
