I began my career as a bedside nurse in the 1990s. I remember one occasion when a doctor, frustrated by our inability to get medical registry data in a timely manner, said, “I could have made changes if I had that information sooner. I’ve had 200 people on my operating room table during this time.” Clinicians have long used data from medical registries to improve care delivery. For many decades, registries have collected valuable data on outcomes for populations based on a specific disease or condition. Unfortunately, physicians have struggled to leverage the value of their clinical and nonclinical registry data despite their potential to help improve processes and quality of care.

When I started working with registries in the early ’90s, clinicians were required to populate paper forms with patient information and submit them to the registries. The registry bodies would then compile and return the data from participating providers – six months later. Emerging digital technologies allow health systems to circumvent this glacially slow process and harness registry data to improve care and operational efficiency.

Registries are far more than a database of clinical information; they can help save lives. If a patient comes into the ED unconscious, registry information can inform care in real-time while sparing the attending nurse from searching for that information or reaching out to a family member.

Understaffed and overwhelmed

Today’s Healthcare organizations are coping with a growing shortage of nurses and crushing workloads exacerbated by an aging population. A nurse is no longer responsible for a single patient in the ICU. An ICU nurse today may be caring for three to four patients at a time while training new staff and performing other administrative tasks like clinical data abstraction.

The nursing shortage, unfortunately, will only worsen

as older nurses retire from the workforce. The inevitable result will be further burnout and attrition, which will have a negative impact on patient care. A recent study published by Medical Care concludes, “Reducing the proportion of RNs in hospitals, even when total nursing personnel hours are kept the same, is likely to result in significant avoidable patient deaths, readmissions, longer lengths of stay, and decreased patient satisfaction, in addition to excess Medicare costs and forgone cost savings to hospitals.”

The Power of Data to Improve Healthcare

I’ve never met a nurse who got into the profession to become wealthy. People enter nursing because they are driven to help others. That doesn’t mean, however, that a full-time staff nurse isn’t resentful of a travel nurse, who often makes up to three times their annual pay. Such blatant pay disparities fuel the low morale that plagues too many nurses.

If nurses are to fulfill their primary mission of caring for patients amid continued short-staffing and growing demand for care, they desperately need help. If available technologies can be deployed to alleviate manual charting burdens and other administrative functions, nurses will have more time for direct patient care.

Believe it or not, nurses also don’t enter the field because they have a burning desire to perform clinical data abstraction! Manual data abstraction is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly for health systems. Yet high-quality data remains essential to quality care, making data abstraction a critical function within every hospital and health system. Still, it’s a function that takes time away from a provider organization’s real mission, which is to deliver care to patients.

When hospitals and health systems use automation augmented by artificial intelligence (AI) for data abstraction, they help nurses work at the top of their licenses, providing bedside care that no technology could ever replace. A nurse’s ability to spend additional time and focus at the point of care improves patient safety and outcomes, as the study published in Medical Care shows.

In addition to relieving the administrative burden on clinical staff, AI and automation are helping hospitals realize valuable cost savings and greater efficiencies. AI-based automation, for example, can cut clinical data abstraction costs by up to 50% while abstracting data exponentially faster than humans.

Since AI and automation provide staff nurses more time to devote to patient care, hospitals, and health systems reduce their need to pay travel nurses, generating even more cost savings.

Rather than focusing solely on cost reduction and improving margins, hospitals should ask nurses on the front lines what support they need to do their jobs best. Provider organizations must actively listen to their nursing bedside staff to understand what is taking up most of their time from patient care, monitoring, and coordination.

Conclusion 

The aforementioned surgeon regretted his inability to get registry data faster and understood how critical trustworthy data is to improve patient care. That remains just as true today. The ongoing shortage of nurses and growing manual abstraction tasks and chart responsibilities make it hard for these dedicated healthcare professionals to focus on patient care.

AI and automation can improve the accuracy and efficiency of data collection, allowing hospitals and health systems to spend more time improving processes and patient care. The end result is improved clinical outcomes, and that’s ultimately what healthcare should be all about.

The post How Automation Gives Nurses More Time for Patient Care  first appeared on Daily Nurse.