Author: LouAnn Bala, VP, Strategic Product Management, GetWell
Here’s a startling fact: by 2040, Canada’s senior population—those age 65 and older— is expected to grow by 68%. It makes sense that as more than half of the population reaches its golden years, the demand for healthcare will also increase. Though two decades away, this is disturbing news as more and more healthcare providers—especially nurses—are experiencing increasing rates of burnout, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The good news is that moving toward a patient-centric approach has shown to drive better outcomes, reduce hospital personnel burnout, and lead to more positive patient experiences.
Battling Burnout
New research reveals that burnout among healthcare workers, particularly nurses, was high long before the pandemic hit Canada. In spring 2020, the prevalence of severe burnout was 30%-40%. By spring 2021, that number rose to more than 60%. Since COVID-19 began, the months of heightened pressure have only added fuel to the once slow-burning fires of discontent nurses experienced.
This is especially unsettling since the time nurses spend with patients—about 70% of their shift—is invaluable. The quality of the time nurses spend in direct patient care can have a dramatic effect on patient outcomes, the number of medical errors, and patient and nurse satisfaction.
Experienced and caring doctors and nurses are a commodity that can’t be easily replaced. To combat healthcare provider burnout, Canadian hospitals are focusing on ways to utilize staff more productively and reduce the workload for front-line care givers. By eliminating inefficiencies and redundancies and empowering patients to be a part of their care—patient engagement—nurses can provide more accurate, patient-focused care, reducing the factors that influence and lead to burnout.
A Smarter Approach to Optimized Care
Embracing new technology that can help deliver more personalized healthcare not only results in better outcomes but streamlines and improves clinical workflows. Digital tools, such as patient-engagement solutions like Get Well, help validate rounding compliance, promote real-time service recovery, and create more informed conversations between patients and their family members and healthcare providers at the point of care.
Get Well’s future-focused, proprietary workflow engine transforms the hospital experience and outcomes for both patients and clinicians. Each application is intuitive and human-centered and has been proven to enable you and your staff to:
- Improve every patient interaction
- Prevent patient falls and other risks
- Receive actionable data that provides a real-time window into the patient’s status
- Reach more patients without adding staff and allow teams to manage by exception
- Ensure patients understand what to do, when to do it, and why
- Prioritize care with other patients
- Reduce hospital length of stay
These benefits have resulted in:
- Reducing complications by more than 50%
- Reducing readmissions by 45%
- Delivering outcomes that improve patient satisfactions scores by 30+%
- Generating new downstream revenue opportunities
Better Care and Less Burnout
Outfitted with integrative patient-engagement technology, the smart hospital room can make the difference in how nurses, both today and in the future, deliver much-needed care for Canada’s aging population. The smart hospital room enables hospital staff to enhance their delivery of patient care by creating greater efficiency from registration and intake through patient discharge. This refined process can alleviate staff burnout without diminishing the quality of the care nurses provide.
Healthcare staff are provided with all the information they need to optimize the continuum of care as soon as they walk into the patient’s room. With quick access to important care information, such as drug dosage and times, when and what the patient ate, and what discharge protocols have been met and not met, nurses can spend more time having meaningful conversations with patients and caregivers without the stress of feeling pulled to move quickly on to the next patient. This technology also enables patients to communicate with staff anytime, reducing extraneous activities like running back and forth to satisfy patient requests.
Patients and caregivers are more confident when they leave, empowering them to have a better recovery, and your nursing staff can feel more confident that they delivered the best possible care, without feeling stressed out or overwhelmed.
The Rx for Provider Burnout
Through a partnership with PX Solutions, Get Well developed a suite of patient-centric solutions that integrate interactive mobile applications, secure health IT and data, and healthcare management expertise.
PX Solutions is the first patient engagement platform utilized in a Canadian hospital, leading the way for greater patient-centric care. This solution removes the challenge of inefficient patient data collection and recording—a leading factor in burnout—to optimize clinical workflows, deliver more favorable outcomes, and improve patient care and satisfaction.
The industry’s most versatile and full-featured mobile patient rounding tool, PX Solutions streamlines data collection, reduces documentation time, offers customizable surveys, and supports unlimited use cases, including nurse communications, clinician satisfaction, compliance audits and feedback from patients and their families. PX Solutions also integrates seamlessly with your existing Health Information Systems (HIS) and in-room technology, putting the power to communicate, connect, and collaborate into the hands of providers and the patients they care for.
Built on a Cisco infrastructure backbone and combining industry-leading networking and connections with leading-edge smart healthcare technology, PX Solutions is the evolution of top-of-license care.
To learn more about how Get Well’s advanced digital technology can help you improve nurse efficiency, check out this blog post. You can also watch this video to learn how PX Solutions helps clinicians empower their patients through every step of their health journey.