Episode 19 : From Concept to Reality:

SCTS - Wendy Kiepek and Jennifer Glenn.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

SCTS - Wendy Kiepek and Jennifer Glenn.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Intro/Outro:
Welcome to the Smart Care Team Spotlight presented by care.ai, the smart care facility, platform company, and leader in AI and ambient intelligence for healthcare. Join Molly McCarthy, former CNO of Microsoft, as she interviews the brightest minds in healthcare about the transformational promise of AI and ambient intelligence for care teams.

Molly McCarthy:
Too often, technology makes caregivers' lives harder, not easier. It's time for smart technology to empower care with a more human touch. Today, I'm excited to share two remarkable guests with you, who will illustrate the power of teamwork and specifically take us on a deep dive into the strategic approaches and practical insights on how virtual nursing, done right, is enabling care, transformation, and restoring joy to the nursing profession and delighting patients in the process. Wendy Kiepek brings over 25 years of extensive experience at the intersection of healthcare information technology. She is recognized for her contributions to healthcare informatics, notably for her pivotal role in leading the transition to a new electronic health record system. Wendy remains a dynamic force in shaping and implementing strategic initiatives. Her leadership extends to the forefront of virtual care technologies, where she plays a key role in driving innovation in overseeing the successful integration of virtual nursing services. We also have with us Jennifer Glenn. With over 15 years of nursing experience, Jennifer is passionate and a dedicated nurse leader who strives to provide excellent and safe care to patients and families. Jen has a master of Science in Nursing Administration and is currently certified as a Nurse Executive with previous certifications in pediatric nursing and legal Nurse Consulting. She works as a Senior Associate of Nursing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a prestigious academic medical center and magnet organization that values innovation, collaboration, and excellence. I'm so thrilled to have you both here today. Welcome.

Wendy Kiepek:
Thank you. Glad to be here.

Jennifer Glenn:
Thank you, Molly.

Molly McCarthy:
So, as I mentioned, both of you have been at Vanderbilt for some time. And obviously Vanderbilt Health has been a beacon for innovation in clinical informatics for so long that it appears baked into your organizational DNA. So, my first question is for both of you, and we'd love to hear and share with our audience more about the culture of innovation at Vanderbilt, and how nursing and information technology collaborate around identifying and prioritizing problems as well as solutions.

Wendy Kiepek:
So I can start, at Vanderbilt Our culture of innovation is deeply embedded in the five pillars at Vanderbilt, which serve as our foundation for setting our organizational goals and direction. These pillars provide a comprehensive framework for us that guide our approach to our goals, our evaluations, and our communications. It's really great because the collaboration between our nursing team, nursing informatics and information technology is the cornerstone of our innovative endeavors. We have worked together to identify and prioritize problems throughout the project, and to find solutions that can enhance the quality of care and educational practices and the overall healthcare delivery. By leveraging this synergy between the nursing expertise and the cutting-edge information technology, we're really pushing the boundaries of what's possible in healthcare. We're not only adapting the evolving technology that is being shared and provided to us, we're also actively shaping the future of healthcare, and our emphasis on innovation has underscored our dedication to staying at the forefront of these advancements and ensuring that our systems of care are not only efficient, but also responsive to the dynamic needs of our patients and the broader healthcare community.

Molly McCarthy:
Jen, I don't know if you have anything to add to that.

Jennifer Glenn:
That was a great description by Wendy.

Molly McCarthy:
Okay, perfect. I love the fact that you really talked about the cornerstone and the partnership and teamwork. I think that's critical just because obviously everyone has their specific objectives that they're trying to improve, and coming together is so important as you move forward, as we move forward around solving some of the biggest challenges around healthcare. My next question is really around the people you serve, and you talked about the patients at the end of our last discussion here. And so, like many health systems, Vanderbilt is capacity to constrain, to serve all the people that need your help. Obviously, due to increasing care needs of a growing population across Tennessee, coupled with workforce shortages, which really exacerbate the burden of our bedside caregivers. So how did this reality that you're faced with lead to you reimagining your care models, including reassessing traditional staffing ratios? And then also, how did virtual nursing fit into your approach?

Jennifer Glenn:
Thank you. Mo,lly. So you alluded to the fact that we are in a national nursing shortage. And unfortunately we don't anticipate that shortage getting any better for at least the next few years. So many organizations we've learned have implemented virtual nursing and then evaluated opportunities to adjust staffing models and increase patient ratios on the back end. Here at Vanderbilt, we took a slightly different approach. In January of 2023, we held a retreat in which over a 100 individuals that included frontline nurses, our unlicensed assistive personnel, which we call care partners here, and nursing leaders from all of our inpatient units, gathered to really evaluate the current roles and responsibilities of our tasks of our staff to ensure everyone was practicing at the top of their license and skill set. So, we wanted to know what tasks were currently being completed by the nurse that could appropriately be delegated to our care partners. What tasks were being completed by our care partners that could be delegated to other members of the healthcare team? And again, we really valued that shared decision making and shared governance and opportunities to collaborate with our frontline staff, which was huge for us.

Jennifer Glenn:
Throughout the retreat, we reviewed all of the roles and responsibilities, and we ultimately made adjustments to our unit staffing matrices. We often reduced unit staffing by 1 to 2 RNs, but supplemented them with additional care partner support to maintain that patient safety. We implemented those changes in the spring and summer of 2023, and while they have been overall successful, Vanderbilt leadership acknowledged that we would need additional support to sustain these new models, which is when virtual nursing was introduced. So, our virtual nursing launched in July of 2023, and our virtual nurses have been great partners with our front line staff. They've been able to take work off of their frontline staff, including with admissions or discharges, safety rounds, high-risk dual medication sign-offs. And we've also found that our virtual nurses have been a fantastic resource for our staff, particularly those that are early in their career, and they've been able to provide in-the-moment coaching on a variety of skills, whether that be where do I find a policy? How do I document this? Or can you help me with this PICC Line Removal or another procedure that I've never managed before?

Molly McCarthy:
I love that that's one of the most positive impacts that I've heard from you and really from other institutions is that mentorship of our more seasoned nurses, helping out the new graduate nurses, not just from a mentorship perspective, but also if you look at, think about it from really from a patient safety perspective as well. And just to circle back to on your retreat, first of all, congrats. That's so important to have that feedback loop from the people that are actually out there every day doing the work and the inclusion of both your bedside and unlicensed or your care partners critical in addition to the leader. So kudos to you all for doing that and for really getting the voice of your clinicians to provide that insight, to think about how can we really work more effectively and to top of license. I know so many people are struggling with that, so sharing that I hopefully will inspire others. The other question I have for you, kind of as a follow along, and you talked a little bit about what you're doing around virtual and patient care, but the term Virtual Nursing is actually, I think, a bit of a misnomer for the way you're leveraging virtual and patient care. And so I would love for you to share, to really take a deeper dive into your virtual nursing model and how you are expanding across to other disciplines and the value that creates for all of your stakeholders the nurse, the patient, the system.

Wendy Kiepek:
I can start and then I'll hand it off to Jen to talk about some of the advancements we've done. I just want to highlight what Jen said, which is the virtual nursing was a model of care that we implemented to support those models of care that we provided. So the technology was an enabler, we threw the technology on top of a process that was working, and that was really key to the success that we saw with one of our first units. And so what we did was we transitioned existing nurses, usually the patient flow nurses who really understood how patients move through the system. We transitioned them into this virtual nursing role. These PFNs had great relationships with the nurses on the unit already, so we didn't have to worry about building those relationships, they already existed. The trust was already there. And so when we implemented the virtual care or the virtual nursing technology on our unit, we had these virtual nurses leveraging the technology to support the activities that Jen mentioned just a few minutes ago. They didn't just stick to the script, though. That was the exciting part to me because when we first went live, we were meant to go live with just admission and discharge tasks. These virtual nurses took it upon themselves to identify other opportunities to support the bedside nurses. It could have been anything as simple as helping to complete an MRI checklist before having to go to the MRI. It could be documenting for a procedure that was taking place in the room so that the bedside nurse didn't have to do that documentation. So, we really looked at the technology as an enabler, and we didn't just follow the script that was given to us; we evolved it based on the needs of the unit. In fact, it was so successful that other disciplines quickly latched on to the potential opportunities to leverage the technology for other business cases. And I'm going to hand it off to Jen, because she's worked so closely with these teams, and she can share a little bit of what we've seen with our pharmacy and our scheduling team.

Jennifer Glenn:
Thank you Wendy. So as Wendy mentioned, we have expanded the technology to our pharmacist as well as our access center. So, our pharmacy team is really using the technology for three different workflows. One are pharmacy techs are doing the medication admission history upon patient arrival. Vanderbilt is a huge footprint, it's a huge campus, and we realize that often a lot of time is spent wasted traveling from one unit to the next, waiting on elevators, arriving to a patient room and the patients off the unit. So by utilizing this technology, we're able to expedite the process to get the information we need to safely care for those patients. The second workflow is our medication counseling. So maybe the pharmacist have a question about a patient's reaction to a certain medication. Is it a true allergy versus a sensitivity? Now, they're able to get that information virtually. And then the third, and I think one of our biggest benefits, is using our virtual care technology to facilitate our meds-to-beds program, which is our outpatient medication delivery service. So when a patient is ready for discharge and prescriptions are ordered, we can actually fill those in-house through our outpatient pharmacy, do medication teaching, and then deliver those medications so the patient has them in hand before they're discharged.

Jennifer Glenn:
So it's been a huge win. And it's increased the efficiency of our pharmacy team by having this technology to quickly enter the room virtually. Another area we've expanded is through our access center, particularly as it relates to scheduling of Post-discharge follow up appointments. There's research that shows that scheduling appointments prior to a patient being discharged significantly improves patient compliance, which we know reduces post-discharge complications, and hopefully, we'll see a reduction in readmissions as well. So we're really excited about those additional workflows we've been able to incorporate into our technology. And as Wendy mentioned, we have additional services that are already reaching out and saying, hey, can we use this technology as well? So, our critical care outreach team wants to use the technology for rapid responses and codes. How can they get an additional provider in the room to help support during those situations? Our case managers would be a great addition as well. And then opportunities to expand to DME are Durable Medical Equipment Services. And how can we again, quickly utilize our resources to get the information we need when we need it so we can deliver safe, efficient, expedient patient care?

Molly McCarthy:
That's amazing. I want to highlight first some concepts for our listeners that Wendy you mentioned and then recap Jen. Also, the additional use cases, two things that really stuck out to me that I think are so important, Wendy, that you talked about is that the nurses that were working transitioned into the virtual nurse roles had already established relationships with the nurses on the unit, so they had those relationships. There was a trust. And I think that is so key to see success happen because it's different when you're in person than when you're on screen. So I think that's a really important piece for our listeners. I've even heard where nurses work both virtually and on the unit, more of a hybrid model. But I think thinking about what works for your staff and it could be unit-dependent. Um, the other piece that you mentioned that I want to go back to is just that tech really was an enabler here. It was essentially put into processes that already worked, it wasn't like you were creating new processes. Well, perhaps, maybe in some cases. But I think that's important to really focus on the technology, but also really highlight the people and processes that need to make it happen. And then also just what I like to call the tip of the iceberg, how you went off script and how the nurses are continuing to find other use cases besides, for example, admit and discharge. I think you mentioned a few others with procedures, etc., and then I think, you know, success has a way of, you know, people want to understand how they can get involved in just the expansion into pharmacy; I think is brilliant, quite frankly.

Molly McCarthy:
I know some of the challenges. Way back in the day when I worked clinically with, for example, you mentioned the meds to beds, just, you know, going home as a nurse, I would always have concern about, okay, this patient's going home. Are they really going to be able to get their medications fulfilled in a timely manner? So having that delivery to the patient room before they go home is so important. And then also the access center with expansion to scheduling those follow-up appointments. So again, congratulations really on leveraging the technology, I think initially for thinking about it for one thing, but expanding beyond that. And I think just like everything in healthcare, the virtual piece will it's not like separate, it's a part of the care. And it's not going to be either or, it's both together—so great, great work. I want to shift the focus now to a little bit more of financial perspectives, etc., that we obviously have to think about as we evaluate new technology and new ways of providing care. So obviously, health systems we hear daily, I hear daily how operating on razor-thin margins and there's tremendous competition for limited budgets. So what metrics are you tracking? How do you define value? We talked a little bit about outcomes, but would love to hear more about how you, as you started to invest in this new technology. How were you able to go to administration and really justify this expansion and this program?

Jennifer Glenn:
Sure. So as we already mentioned, Vanderbilt actually made adjustments to our staffing models prior to implementing virtual technology. So we knew that there were likely no additional staffing FTE dollars to be realized. But we were able to consider that when we were trying to make the case for virtual nursing. We have, however, focused on our overall value of investment and are tracking many metrics to help us determine success. So, we are using the NASA TLX survey to evaluate perceived nurse workload. We are looking at various capacity metrics such as discharge by 11 or discharge order to discharge turnaround time. We are looking at lake clock-out times. Are our staff able to clock out at their scheduled shift in time rather than staying behind to complete task and documentation? We're looking at meal breaks. Are our nurses able to get their meal breaks? Acknowledging the additional support and oversight our virtual nurses can provide. We're looking at quality metrics, so those hospital-acquired conditions are pressure injuries, our collapses, our cautis. We're looking at regulatory requirements as it comes to documentation. We're looking at patient satisfaction. We actually work with Press Ganey to add a specific question on patient satisfaction to the survey sent to patients on our virtual nursing units. And we have seen some of our highest press Ganey scores, maybe ever at Vanderbilt on our units that are live, and they've been up to the 99th percentile at press Ganey scores, which for an inpatient unit is something we're really, really proud of.

Jennifer Glenn:
We've also had a lot of good catches and coaching opportunities that we referenced earlier. For example, we had a patient whose medications had been incorrectly sent to a mail-order pharmacy, which would have resulted in a several-day delay in that patient receiving his medications. The virtual nurse realized this and was able to talk with the healthcare team and have those medications rerouted to the Meds to Beds pharmacy, so the patient had them in hand before they were discharged. We have additional good catches related to medication infusions, monitoring, equipment challenges, and as we mentioned, coaching for our novice staff has been invaluable on our unit. We've seen units that have the technology versus those that don't have the technology on units. Without the technology, the leaders and the educators are still getting a lot of questions as staff are coming off orientation, and while they are happy to answer those, they aren't always there. So sometimes, there may be a delay in getting the resources or answers they need. On the units, with virtual technology, staff are able to get those answers in the moment, and so it's been really beneficial to see how our new graduate nurses and our novice staff are using the virtual nurses to help progress their career and make sure they have the resources they need to be successful.

Molly McCarthy:
That's amazing, I think, what I'm hearing in terms of the metrics are really around, uh, couple, you know, obviously, operational effectiveness and efficiencies, which, as you mentioned, so much time is being wasted, perhaps, you know, I don't know, waiting for a bed to turn over, etc., or just transitioning to another unit, obviously patient safety. And then the one other piece that I really want to highlight is for staff, the clinicians. Obviously, we talked at the start of the podcast around nursing shortages. And it's not just a shortage. It's looking at why are young, younger nurses actually leaving the profession so early. And I think the concept around having those new nurses paired with a virtual nurse, a more seasoned nurse who can help and support them beyond their orientation period, is so critical to address kind of the overarching issue that I think nursing is focused are dealing with today. So thank you. And also, I love that you worked with Press Ganey to get that extra question. And I know it's critical to understand kind of where you know how your patients are thinking and what could be done better as you move forward. Second to last question here, and you've talked about it a little bit, but obviously, there's been a lot of noise across the virtual nursing vendor landscape over the past couple of years, really starting, you know, a virtual nursing as a concept it's been around for a while, really, with a couple different approaches. One is simply to put a camera in the patient room, enabling remote visits, which is incremental value but ultimately becomes just another point solution among way too many other point solutions that really continue just to fragment care, both for the caregiver and honestly the patient. So secondly, virtual nursing can be the tip of the spear for something much more transformational, which we've heard you talk about not just for nursing, but for other areas in the hospital. So where the camera is part of a sophisticated sensor with ambient monitoring capabilities wrapped in with artificial intelligence. So I'm wondering if you can share with our listeners, how did you approach virtual nursing to ensure Vanderbilt would have a platform and a partnership that would strategically evolve and grow as you went beyond your immediate priorities. And to add on to the question, and I'm happy to repeat it too, what are those additional considerations and use cases that your peers should keep in mind as they are figuring out how to go from pilot to scale with virtual nursing as a part of a journey to create smart care teams. I know that was a long question.

Wendy Kiepek:
So yeah, I'll take this one. So we started with the patient at the center. You can't do anything wrong, if you keep the patient at the center and involving them throughout the process. And we did just that on our first pilot unit, we made modifications where we needed to. And the feedback from the patients played a crucial role in refining these workflows. And I'll give you an example of that. But I want to mention, you know, Jen was just talking about the metrics and what she didn't really highlight. But I want to just emphasize, because it's really core to the success of the program so far, is the visibility of the leadership team during the implementation and even after the implementation, the leadership team has been very visible, supporting the bedside nurses, supporting the virtual nurses, but also rounding on the patients, because as much of a technology transformation this is for healthcare, it's also a transformation for our patients. And so early on in the pilot, we had this notion of rounding. We were going to do safety rounds to, you know, during the two shifts in the morning and in the afternoon slash evening and then in the middle of the night, just to make sure that everything, the patient's environment of care, was safe and the patient was also safe. Initially, in the pilot, it was very disruptive because when you turn the camera on, the TV turns on, makes noise, wakes the patient up. It was very disruptive to them and it was a big disatisfier. But because of the feedback loops we had in place with the patient and our team and the great partnership which I'll talk to in a minute with our vendor, we were able to immediately address that challenge, and we implemented something called night rounds.

Wendy Kiepek:
And so with the night rounds, the camera turns on. You can see because it has the dark light. So you can see even though the room is pitch black, the TV stays off, we're not communicating with the patient. We're just basically like knocking on the door, peeking in, making sure everything's okay. And then we leave, leaving the patient's sleep uninterrupted. That's been a really big value add to the program and to our safety metrics. But when you think about what is the true success of the program... Jen and I are here for a reason together, and that's because we didn't look at this as a nursing project or an IT project, we looked at this as a collaboration between not only nursing but our clinical teams, our leadership teams, informatics, and information technology. This cross-functional team worked together, bringing in different perspectives to make sure we had a comprehensive approach to addressing all the challenges and aligning the technologies to meet the clinical needs. The nurses and the clinical teams are really great about saying what they need. The technology teams are really great about identifying how to support those needs technically, and that was the secret sauce to our success for the program. But in addition to the partnership with our Vanderbilt team, we have a really great partnership with our virtual care vendor.

Wendy Kiepek:
Our goal was to when we were looking at vendors in the market, we weren't just looking at the technology, we were looking at the vendor we wanted to partner with and how well they would evolve to our needs. And so that was the cornerstone of our goal, building that strong partnership not with only the virtual care vendor but also the other third-party vendors. Think about Getwell, which is our entertainment and education platform critical to the success of virtual care because it's tightly integrated with the virtual care technology, but also our language line interpreter services. And by having those three vendors working really closely together and the partnership with us, it enabled us to make sure we had a seamless integration between all those technologies. What we really appreciate with our virtual care vendor is their ability and desire to evolve and grow with our organization beyond the immediate goals. So if you remember, initially, we were just implementing admission and discharge processes. They didn't have any workflows built into their system to support pharmacy workflows or scheduling workflows. We identified that as an early need for our team, and they partnered with us to build that workflow into their technology. And so it was really very helpful to us that they were willing to design these new workflows and enhance existing workflows like night rounding to meet our unique needs. So when you ask, you know, what other considerations to keep in mind? There's a lot, I mean, we've talked about how we've identified our metrics. We identified our metrics long before go live.

Wendy Kiepek:
In fact, Jen and I spent many hours together trying to come up with some really value-added metrics that can be measured. You can identify metrics all day long, but how are you going to measure them and track them? So what I would say in terms of other considerations is, number one, you have to have support at the highest level in your organization. And in order to do that, it's having the strategic goals of the organization align with what we're trying to achieve with the virtual nursing. The overall healthcare strategy and mission should align with what your goals are and with the virtual care. And because we had strong alignment there with our mission and our goals, it was easy to pitch the business case for bringing virtual care technologies into Vanderbilt. We also talked a lot about making sure the current processes were in place and they worked. You heard about Jen with the nursing care models and making sure we had those implemented. We are not bringing virtual care into any units that have not implemented the care models. The care models come first, virtual care follows later. And if there are other process improvements we need to do, we're going to bring those into the process ahead of time so that we can tweak those before we introduce any new technology. We talked about the metrics. So it's really important to not only define the metrics, but know how you're going to measure them. This has been and continues to be.

Wendy Kiepek:
Jen is our metrics czar, for sure, she tracks these metrics daily. We can see where we're going, we can see where we might need to modify what we're doing because we're keeping such close track of those metrics. But it took us a long time to identify which metrics we wanted to track, because there are so many we can track, and then being able to communicate those out. And the other thing I want to mention about that is we had our baseline data, so we know what the unit looked like before we went live with virtual care, and we know where we're trending since virtual care has been implemented. So, I think it's really important that you just don't implement the technology without knowing what your goals are and how you're going to measure them. And our virtual care team, we meet regularly, at least weekly. We touch base probably daily, so that collaboration exists long after the implementation. And the other thing that we haven't mentioned, but I think is pretty cool, is we're expanding virtual care technologies throughout the acute care units in our adult hospital. And as we add new units, we're bringing future leaders into those project meetings so they can hear about what we're doing with the next rollout, even though they might be 2 or 3 units down the line, so they can get adjusted and hear about some of the things we're doing, and they can get their units prepared months ahead of when we're coming to their unit. Jen, I don't know if you have anything else you want to add to that.

Jennifer Glenn:
Thank you. Wendy, I think that was a great summary. I think I just want to highlight, again, the collaboration we have had here has made this program a success, and without any key stakeholder, we may have had different outcomes. So whether that was from our IT department, our nursing leadership, our nursing informatics, really the collective brainpower of everyone involved has made this such a success. And like I said, we are so valuable for the teamwork and collaboration we've had here and moving forward. We look forward to continue collaborating with other areas as we expand the technology across the enterprise.

Molly McCarthy:
Yeah, well, you guys obviously have put together a remarkable program, and I'm sitting here thinking, gosh, aside from this podcast, I hope that you're sharing, spreading this gospel so that people can really learn from the success. And, Wendy, you mentioned quite a few steps in the process to really, at the end of the day, when you do launch, make it successful. And I hope that you guys, you know, publish and share your findings. And just to highlight again, the partnership, not only with your team internally, because obviously that's key. We've talked about that. But then with the vendors, and you know you mentioned pharmacy, and there wasn't a model or a workflow around that. So just the idea of having a vendor that you trust and you can quote unquote go off script with them, so to speak, and kind of create what's next. I think that's really important. And then, just to loop back around the organization's strategic goals and really aligning what you're doing with your virtual care program to the bigger picture, I think is obviously important in terms of getting that support. So, so many nuggets of wisdom there. I'm going to have to go back and listen to that a few times again myself—so one final question here and obviously tons of thoughts and insights today for our listeners. And if you think about it, the profile of our listeners, there are a lot of CNOs, CNIOs, their teams, people at the bedside, nurses at the bedside and would love to hear from each of you. Your single most important practical piece of advice as they think about successfully scaling virtual nursing or even starting virtual nursing at their respective institutions.

Wendy Kiepek:
That's going to be really hard for me because there's not one magic bullet. It was a combination of many things that made this successful. But if you're going to force me to choose just one thing, I'm going to have to say, don't look at this as a technology project, it goes well beyond the technology. It's transforming the way in which we deliver care to the patient, not just for the nurses, but for the entire care team. It is a virtual care technology, so we need to treat it as that transformative project and as such, bringing in that multidisciplinary team to think about it holistically. So we didn't mention this previously, but we actually have clinicians, physicians that sit on our project team, even though it's not being implemented with the physicians right now, because we know that that's where it's going to scale. And we know that this is a team activity. So my one piece of advice is build a team that is cross-functional, multidisciplinary, focus on those people process side of things before jumping into the technology and make sure you have that strong foundation in order to achieve the success you're looking for by enabling that technology.

Molly McCarthy:
Thank you Wendy. Jan, I would love to hear from you.

Jennifer Glenn:
Yeah, I'm going to add on just a little bit. I think engaging frontline staff, whether that is a physician or a bedside nurse or a care partner in the work from the beginning is really going to help with buy-in, and the overall success failed to mention, in addition to the retreat we had in January, once we identified our first unit for Go Live, we identified the nurses that would be working in the virtual nurse role, and we had a mini-retreat with them and said, let's build our workflows. You know that your workflows on the unit better than anyone else. So we really wanted to use their experience and expertise to help us draft and create the work that they would be doing in the virtual nurse role. So relying on the frontline staff to really help guide the success of the virtual technology has been huge. And we also worked with our patients. Like Wendy mentioned, listening to their feedback, making adjustments. We have a very robust patient and family advisory council here at Vanderbilt. We took this information to them and said, what do you think? Where could you see this being a value to you when you're in the hospital or your loved ones in the hospital? So really making sure that we don't lose that human. Interaction and connection with patients, but really adding this in as an additional service to further improve their experience. But again, making sure we don't lose that human aspect. So really engaging frontline staff and patients in this work from the beginning and then continuing to reach out for them and making adjustments and improvements as necessary.

Molly McCarthy:
Well, thank you both so much. I think, you know, my takeaway and hopefully our listeners is obviously it's not a technology product, but it's really transforming care. And Jen, to what you said, which I actually haven't heard a ton, but I can't stress it enough, is bringing in the patient to and really understanding from their perspective what it means for them as a healthcare consumer, it is critical. And so you really have done an excellent job of looking across the stakeholders within the value chain and being inclusive. So again, congratulations and I look forward to hopefully meeting you guys and seeing more in person soon. So thank you so much for being here today.

Wendy Kiepek:
Thanks for having us.

Jennifer Glenn:
Thank you Molly. This has been great.

Intro/Outro:
Thanks for listening to the Smart Care Team's Spotlight for best practices in AI and ambient intelligence, and ways your organization can help lead the era of smart care teams. Visit us at virtualnursing.com. And for information on the leading smart care facility platform, visit care.ai.

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