Across the country, nurse leaders are busy with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities, from reducing the variability of care to acting as an advocate for patients and their staff. That’s why many nurse leaders are leveraging digital tools to support healthcare staff. Digital rounding solutions are proven to be more efficient, and they take the pen and paper out of rounding. Yet, despite these clear benefits, some health systems struggle to drive adoptions, whether it’s from hospital staff or executives.
Perhaps, at this point, you have a solution for rounding, like CipherRounds, and you’re working to raise the bar even further on patient experience and clinical excellence. Moreover, you’re looking to make sure you see a return on investment.
Achieving those goals – and sustaining success – relies heavily on all key stakeholders being on board. So what’s the best approach? And where should you start?
Here’s CipherHealth’s favorite tips for getting buy-in:
- Start small and show results: Launch a new rounding solution program starting with one or two units (versus single floor) or department. Learn from the experience and collect best practices that you can leverage to expand your program.
- Prioritize training: Recognize that implementing a new digital rounding tool may have a significant effect on staff, as you are changing the way they are used to doing things. Even if it is a welcomed change, make sure you educate people on the tool and how to use it so they feel empowered to help drive progress toward system or hospital-level goals.
- Hardwire the process: What could this look like? Incorporate it into your onboarding process – this will also help you drive consistency. Have your healthcare organization leaders block time off on their calendars each day to round on patients. This will help you further engrain rounding into your culture and processes.
- Show me the data: Align on metrics and analytics for success and routinely report on them, whether it’s scheduling a dashboard from Evolve or posting a report on a break room bulletin board. Doing so can help you identify improvement areas and engage your team by recognizing their efforts. It can also help you demonstrate the impact and value of your program to your executive team.
- Tie to corporate initiatives: It’s easier to get buy-in for a program when it is tied to your health system’s overarching goals. These goals should cascade down and align to the facility level, unit level, and individual level goals and performance initiatives. For example, if your organization is running a system-wide safety initiative, frame your rounding process and efforts as part of that.
- Go on a roadshow: Get in front of people! It helps to attend committees and individual team meetings to communicate the value of your new rounding solution program. Also, make sure you tailor your pitch to the group in the room.
With these action points as your reference, you are better poised to secure buy-in across leadership and hospital staff. While the care environment continues to evolve and change, the digital rounding solution program you had a hand in implementing can drive lasting, high-quality care to patients and empower your staff in the long term.
