In today’s evolving healthcare landscape, finding the intersection between clinical workflows and information technology (IT) plays a key role in driving long-term success. In hospitals and health systems, the Chief Nursing Informatics Officer (CNIO) ensures clinicians have the tools they need to deliver high-quality care.
In a recent interview with Health System CIO, Nancy Yates, MSN, RN, RN-BC, CNIO of Providence St. Joseph Health, shares how to create and scale enterprise-wide processes that lead to better patient and staff experiences.
Identifying System-Wide Opportunities
Yates shares key challenges that CNIOs frequently face in developing technology-enhanced workflows, such as creating efficient and standardized systems that empower staff to deliver the highest quality and experience of patient-centered care. Driving towards a system standard is important to scale best practices across a 50-hospital system spanning six states.
In leading the informatics team at Providence St. Joseph Health, Yates helps front-line clinicians articulate their pain points by identifying the deeper issue: “What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Tell us what problem you’re trying to solve, and we’ll help you figure out the best way to do it and the tool for it.” For example, one of Yates’ key stakeholders is nursing leadership. After assuming her role as CNIO of Providence St. Joseph Health, Yates learned that nurses across service lines experienced challenges in developing optimal rounding workflows at the bedside, leading to inconsistencies in delivering high-quality patient experiences. Since everything was paper-based and difficult to track over time, it was difficult to establish accountability across teams.
In response to this challenge, different hospitals went “off in their own direction” to assess digital rounding solutions. These alternative options proved unsuccessful due to poor connectivity, complex reporting, and insufficient account management. Yates soon paused these disparate processes because “in an organization as large as ours you have to have standard platforms, and you can’t scale best practice tools when you’re doing it ten different ways.”
Selecting the Right Technology to Address Problems
To standardize and scale a system-wide solution, Providence St. Joseph Health embraced the opportunity to work with AVIA, the nation’s leading network for health systems seeking to innovate and transform care delivery. AVIA convened a group of health systems to evaluate, select, and implement the best digital rounding solution to improve the patient experience. After applying rigorous diligence to evaluate options with objective scoring criteria, AVIA conducted a “shark-tank” style event where top digital rounding companies conducted demos and fielded questions. Nursing, Information Systems, and Innovation teams reached a unified decision at the end of AVIA’s comprehensive evaluation process, aligning on CipherHealth’s digital rounding solution. After conducting their own due diligence and undergoing a 30-45 day discernment process in which each vendor demoed their product, Providence St. Joseph Health selected and approved CipherHealth as the sole rounding solution to drive enterprise-wide standardization and scale across the organization.
By removing typical biases that exist during the technology evaluation process, Yates and her team focused on features and ROI for system-wide deployment. Yates shares, “CipherHealth landed on top. It was efficient, easy to implement, and very intuitive from an end user perspective, meaning it takes less than 10 minutes to train someone on how to use the tool.” CipherHealth’s intuitive user interface enhances the rounder experience, making it easy to proactively resolve issues and conduct service recovery. With a longitudinal view of historic patient experience data and strong reporting and dashboards, Providence St. Joseph Health standardizes care delivery processes across the health system by comparing activity across individuals, departments, and hospitals. By leveraging real-time data to identify rounding best practices, Providence St. Joseph Health improves the quality of patient care and the overall experience for its entire patient population.
Yates and her team empower providers to drive accountability, consistency, and best-practice processes at the point of care by scaling CipherHealth’s digital rounding solution across the health system. As a result of moving from a manual to a digital rounding process, Providence St. Joseph Health enhances the patient experience, proactively identifies quality and safety process improvement opportunities, and streamlines staff workflows.
How CNIOs Can Achieve Success
Yates believes that a “partner who was willing to help us drive that process and be very open and flexible” was the key to successfully scaling technology for meaningful impact at Providence St. Joseph Health. In their search for a digital rounding solution, Yates and her team gathered feedback from stakeholders across the organization in order to understand the scope of the problem they were trying to address, determine the best solution to meet the needs of their patient population and staff workflows, and implement quickly at scale.
Ultimately, this journey provided Providence St. Joseph Health with a clear path towards developing a unified rounding standard across dozens of hospitals. By scaling a digital solution that optimized rounding processes, Yates and her team executed and maintained rounding best practices to increase patient satisfaction and better support nursing staff.
To learn more about how leading healthcare organizations leverage CipherHealth’s digital rounding solution to improve patient outcomes at scale, check out the following resources:
