Even though they’re meant to ensure patients receive safe, high-quality care, regulations can quickly become a huge burden for nurses, eating up their time as they’re forced to focus on documentation and pulling them away from their focus on patient care.
When nurses are pulled away from patient care, the healthcare organization as a whole can suffer. Patient-centered care is a key component of improving health-related quality of life and results in lower healthcare costs. It results in reduced readmissions, increased patient satisfaction, and savings for healthcare organizations. Let’s take a look at how lightweight, mobile technology can free nurses up from the burden of documentation so that they can focus on patient care.
The Burden of Documentation is Costing Nurses
It’s clear that it’s important for healthcare to find ways to address the burden nurses face thanks to regulatory and documentation requirements. An incredible 19% to 35% of nursing practice time is spent documenting care. Nurses end up documenting an average of one data point every minute and input more than 600 manual flowsheet data entries into EHRs during a 12-hour shift. The upshot is that at times, nurses are pushed to focus so much on documentation that their attention is drawn away from the patient. Practices that are key to quality patient-centered care – like facing patients when talking to them, making eye contact, ensuring that they’re comfortable and they feel that they are being listened to – are difficult for nurses to do when they’re forced to pay so much attention to documentation.
Healthcare Technology Can Alleviate the Burden
The good news is that with the right technology it doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine a situation where nurses could quickly document and share required information right from their smartphone or device, freeing them up to focus on their patients. But not just any technology will do the trick – some technology can actually make life harder for nurses. The technology a healthcare organization adopts should be easy to install and intuitive for nurses to use so that little or even no training is required to get them started on quickly documenting and sharing critical information.
Alleviating the Burden Saves You Money
The costs associated Documentation and regulation requirements quickly add up as nurses are forced to spend more time on these requirements – sometimes to the detriment of patient care – and healthcare organizations opt for bulky equipment to meet these requirements. One recent study even found that healthcare providers spend an average of nearly $39 billion a year on administrative activities associated with regulatory compliance. So how can opting for the right technology alleviate the burden and save you money? Here’s one example:
A Vaporstream customer that is a healthcare organization provides over 100 high end nurses that are deployed for IV drug infusions and other high-end pharmaceutical care by pharmacies. The nurses provide services at the pharmacies or the patient’s home. The organization found that in the course of their work, the nurses were struggling with HIPAA compliance and the tremendous amount of paperwork they had to process – which needed to be digitized and sent privately. Since the nurses were regularly on the move, solutions that required a lot of infrastructure – or even laptops – simply weren’t an option. Vaporstream met their needs because it be installed directly to nurses’ phones or tablets, circumventing the need for any heavy infrastructure. This made it easy for nurses to quickly scan and deliver patient documents, giving them plenty of time to focus on their patients and meet regulation requirements.
Curious how your healthcare organization can also use Vaporstream to free up nurses focus on patient care? Check out these resources here.