Nurses are transforming the future landscape of healthcare by ensuring that patients receive high-quality, compassionate, and appropriate care in the best way for our patients, families, friends, community members, and society.
But as pressure on health systems around the world continues to build, nurses find themselves having to do more with less. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians were overburdened and highly stressed. In a 2019 survey, 44% of registered nurses who responded said they often feel like quitting1.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with increased staffing requirements and nursing workloads, and reduced staffing availability, saw levels of burnout rising to nearly 50 percent during the pandemic2.
As the world starts to emerge from the pandemic, there are a number of tools that can help improve the nursing experience, helping to tackle burnout through utilising technological solutions to reduce the burden.
Improving the nursing experience
Interoperable data management platforms such as Health Information Exchanges (HIE) can provide high-quality information on which nurses can base their decision making. This in turn can help streamline nursing workloads, support better care decisions, enable team-based care, and advance population health management and personalised medicine.
Streamlined nursing workloads: Giving nurses access to a single source of truth, based on up-to-date information that is readily accessible, can provide a considerable boost to efficiency, by minimising frustration levels and maximising ability to manage workloads.
Better care decisions: HIEs have the potential to give nurses much needed time back, reducing the need to “hunt for data”. This allows more time to focus on the critical decision making that is central to patient-centred nursing care, which in turn improves outcomes for patients.
Enabling team-based care: A survey of hospital priorities for 2021 found coordinating care was the highest priority, with nearly two-thirds of respondents focused on the effort3. Implementing interoperable systems will help nurses and other clinicians coordinate their efforts even more effectively by providing data that paints a picture of the whole patient for their entire health team.
Advancement of population and precision medicine: Finally, interoperable systems can also help care provided by clinicians to become increasingly individualised, leading to what experts describe as “precision medicine” – or care to the right person, in the right place, at the right time – while simultaneously supporting population health management.
Involving nurses in development
Nurses have been at the cutting edge of new approaches to delivering health care such as telehealth, and already create and consume huge amounts of patient information.
The move towards greater interoperability between health information systems means it’s vital that the right data management platform, like an HIE, is utilised to help meet the changing demands of contemporary nursing.
By taking on the views of nurses – who are already some of the most frequent users of HIEs – health information interoperable clinical tools will be able to add even more value to clinicians, and provide greater benefits to nurses and their patients.
To learn more read our recent whitepaper, A Nurse’s perspective on interoperability.
This whitepaper offers recommendations regarding the technology capabilities best suited to meet the needs of nurses on the front lines of healthcare. It takes a look into the expanding and evolving roles of nurses and offers a glimpse into some high-value nursing use cases that helps frame the substantial benefits of the right interoperability platform and the role of Health Information Exchange (HIE).
1 AMN Healthcare, Survey of Registered Nurses, 2019
2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34041456/
3 Xtelligent Healthcare Media, Healthcare Industry Priorities 2021, May 2021
This is the fifth blog in the series. The previous blog looked at the importance of “The role of HIEs in the daily lives of nurses“. The next and last blog is a wrap up on the interoperability series.
