The nursing shortage remains a key challenge for the healthcare industry, with federal authorities predicting a shortage of 63,720 full-time nurses in 2030. To address this problem, tech startups are developing tools to simplify nurses’ work and reduce their administrative burden. These include mobile charting apps, tools to enable better communication between care teams, and tech to speed up the nurse handoff process.
These tools are slowly starting to make nurses’ jobs less stressful, and healthcare leaders should be optimistic about the future of nursing technology, said Lavonia Thomas, nursing informatics officer at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, during a recent interview. The less nurses feel overwhelmed, the more likely they are to stay in the career.
Thomas called out dictation tools as something that can help speed up nurses’ administrative tasks. At MD Anderson, nurses are using Epic’s Rover app as a dictation tool to help fill out their flow sheets, which are documents that track a patient’s vital signs, medications and other care details.
“It’s certainly not the same thing as ambient listening, but it does allow a level of efficiency to document some of those one-offs, such as when you medicate a patient for pain and various things that don’t need to be in the electronic health record a long time — it’s easier if you can just dictate it,” Thomas explained.
Nurse dictation sets the stage for a potential transition to ambient listening in the nursing field, she added.
In the future, Thomas hopes nurses will gain access to ambient listening tools that listen in on patient conversations and then generate summaries for documentation purposes. These AI tools have become popular among physicians in the past couple years, but nurses don’t typically have access to them, she pointed out.
When a nurse goes into a patient’s room, it’s usually not long before they start performing various tasks that require documentation, Thomas noted. For example, say a nurse checks in with a patient, assists them with turning in bed, sees if they are in pain, and then administers them pain medication.
“[The nurse] then has to stop, log into the computer and document what they just did. Whereas, what if you could speak to the patient to say, ‘Mr. So-and-So, I’m going to assist you onto your left side. Will that be okay with you?’ and then ask, ‘How do you feel? Are you comfortable? What is your pain level?’” Thomas asked. “That is something I’m used to talking to my patient about, and that would be captured. I don’t have to then stop. I can then move. I can wash my hands, leave the room and move on to my next patient.”
She hopes ambient listening tools will be integrated into nurse workflows soon and said it would be interesting to see how much time they could save nurses.
Photo: FS Productions, Getty Images
