Make skills support part of the nursing workflow
Despite continued investments in learning and development, many health systems are finding that nurses don’t always have the resources they need to deal with mounting pressures.
Patients increasingly present with comorbidities that require complex, coordinated care. Health systems continue to struggle with hiring and nurse-to-patient ratios. Meanwhile, veteran nurses are having to support units they haven’t worked in years; at-home and travel nurses are taking on bigger workloads; and new nurses are bypassing training to “get in the game” sooner.
Every day, nurses face tough care questions they didn’t anticipate. Evidence-based clinical guidance can help them, but will nurses spend time searching to find it? In the heat of the moment, it’s quicker to search the Internet than to go digging through EHR tabs or an internal portal.
Nurses might even avoid asking for help from a colleague for fear of being thought incompetent. And if this situation persists:
Nurses will get increasingly frustrated that they’re not getting the support they need.
Inconsistent use of evidence-based skills and procedures means productivity and care standards may suffer, which can impact patient outcomes, volumes, and reimbursements.
You won’t have visibility into which nurses are viewing—or not viewing—your skills content, making it difficult to remediate issues.
You’ve worked hard to build a strong nursing team. But with the demands on your staff, it’s no longer viable to house evidence-based guidance several clicks away from the typical EHR workflow and hope they will seek it out.
Your nurses don’t have the time to search, so your best approach is to bring resources directly to them—by making skills support part of their workflow. The new Clinical Skills EHR application has been expressly designed so you can do just that.
Put trusted guidance at nurses’ fingertips:
Clinical Skills becomes a new tab within the EHR, leveraging single sign-on (SSO) so nurses don’t have to remember a separate login. And the more each nurse uses the app, the more they will see personalized content with saved searches, favorite skills, and viewing history. By providing quicker access to relevant, evidence-based skills, you’ll remove unnecessary clicks and frustration. At the same time, you’ll standardize how your staff accesses skills content across all care settings so they can practice with more efficiency, clarity, and confidence.
Optimize for your nursing team:
Because the app uses single sign-on (SSO), it ties individual usage to each nurse, so you can slice and dice data and watch patterns develop. For example, you’d be able to see that a majority of nurses in one unit reviewed specific skills, while another group did not. You could use this information to remediate problem areas (e.g., falls, hospital-acquired infections, etc.) and potentially create correlations between usage and outcomes. Ultimately, with more granular usage data, you’ll be able to proactively drive specific clinical programs and further optimize your investment in Clinical Skills.
When you provide evidence-based skills and procedures as part of your nurses’ workflow, they will feel more supported with fast, easy access to the guidance they need. Your staff can stay in the moment, quickly refreshing on skills and building confidence for improved patient care. And you’ll better understand how point-of-care usage of Clinical Skills is impacting your organizational mission.