ORLANDO – With a predicted shortage of nine million nurses worldwide by 2030, healthcare providers are looking to pivot to virtual care and virtual nurses to address staffing shortages and improve patient care, said experts at HIMSS24 preconference Virtual Care Forum on Monday. 

Dr. Murielle Beene, senior vice president and chief health informatics officer at Trinity Health, and Dr. Gay Landstrom, Trinity's senior vice president and chief nursing officer, outlined the benefits of the health system's TogetherTeam Virtual Connected Care approach, which leverages virtual nursing and team-based care.

Beene said that with the knowledge of an impending shortage of nurses, it was imperative to evolve to a care model that leveraged technology to support direct care staff and increase patient interaction.

"Our care model is something you cannot find in any type of literature. We are definitely demonstrating how we're delivering care differently," said Beene. "Instead of just thinking that this is only for nursing, it impacts the way that we engage with our clinicians across the board."

Patients receiving care through this model can anticipate treatment from a direct care registered nurse, an on-site nursing assistant or licensed practical nurse, and a registered nurse who provides virtual support.

The team operates cohesively to ensure comprehensive care delivery. Virtual nurses are situated on local campuses rather than at an off-site call center, which gives them access to complete medical records and the capability to conduct detailed examinations using advanced camera technology.

Beene explained the presence of experienced virtual nurses offers valuable mentoring and support, particularly to new graduate direct care nurses.

"Through the data we've been collecting, which divide between the impact to our colleagues, the impact to our patients and impact to our organization, we're finding efficiencies that we haven't seen before," she said.

Landstrom said staff were worn out after several rough years of the pandemic, which required building processes that would help with their own resiliency and come together as a team.

"We needed to build processes that, if we were going to be working with a patient in a virtual way, would help in establishing that therapeutic relationship between the team and the patient that they were caring for," Landstrom said.

To do so, they needed to leverage technology within the EHR as well as technology to connect with patients visually and auditorily.

That led to a reprogramming of the whole system to include a button the patient could push and automatically connect to a virtual nurse.

"The patients thought it was an absolute game changer to have access to their team when they wanted it, instead of the old situation," Landstrom said.

She hired some of her retired chief nurses who demonstrated skills with relational coordination and educational design to coach individual units as they planned for change.

"As people begin to experience and understand what really is brought to the patient, and how it changes the experience for the registered nurses, for the partners working with them, then we really have some tremendous buy-in," Landstrom said.