BOSTON – After introducing artificial intelligence into the systems where nurses typically work, Mercy achieved $52 million in talent retention and workforce engagement, a 20 percent improvement in the quality of nurses’ electronic health records and a 17 percent escalate in nurse productivity, Betty Jo Rocchio, senior vice president of the health system, said during the HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum.
Rocchio, a nurse executive and nurse practitioner, said healthcare comes with “a huge responsibility but also an opportunity to grow as a person.”
By moving to mobile scheduling, developing an automated nurse credentialing system and fixing AI-related glitches to streamline emergency-to-inpatient handoffs across all 51 of the health system’s hospitals, Mercy has built a more resilient workforce and improved retention.
The results of our efforts can be seen in the numbers.
“We need to have analytics in the background to make sure we’re making the right decision.”
Why a Tech-Enabled Workforce
Hal Wolf, president and CEO of HIMSS, the parent company of , opened the forum by discussing the anomalies that continue to confront the healthcare industry.
The skilled-workforce challenge will resurface regularly — “a challenge that’s making every health system look up and figure out how to use new tools to improve or expand their ability to care for people,” he said.
He noted that in 2018, the healthcare sector predicted there would be a global shortfall of 13 million doctors by 2035, while about a year ago the World Health Organization estimated the number at 18 million.
Rocchio agreed. “I just don’t think we can wait another 10 to 15 years to find out if we’re going to have the people we need in the model of care we offer today,” she said.
“One of the main goals is how to build the workforce.”
To address this, Mercy has focused on using AI to solve workflow and work environment challenges.
“If we could get those three things right in healthcare – regardless of the setting, whether it’s a home hospital, whether it’s virtual care, whether it’s bedside care in an inpatient setting – we’d be a lot further along today,” she said.
Rocchio said a team of technologists, nursing leaders and informaticians, analyzing evidence-based data, found that the most crucial thing for all generations working in nursing today is elastic pay, work-life balance and control over scheduling.
“We can’t underestimate the value of this concept of human flourishing today and say that while we need people to work in a certain way, the new generations just won’t do it,” she said.
“I’ll just say it like it is, we’re a mess in healthcare, sometimes in the process. We need to go back and sort it out in an organized way, in a way that technology needs to be consumed.”
The digital transformation of the healthcare system has followed Everett Rogers’s theory of the diffusion of innovation, and there is now a system and process that extends to the workforce layer.
She added that by implementing an automated nurse credentialing system, Mercy has reduced the time spent on staffing and scheduling by about 25%.
When nursing staff, core and fleeting, are recruited, they operate an accreditation system to plan appropriate shifts, and it works.
“The concept of supply and demand, which has been around for a million years,” she said. “We’ve applied it to health care, we’ve brought technology to it, and we have analytics to measure ourselves.”
While nurse managers initially had concerns about filling rosters, data showed staff would take on available shifts.
“After two years, it still works great, you can still see all the data, and everyone has calmed down. But it’s a bit of a pain to get to this point.”
Reducing the cognitive load of nurses
Rocchio says spending 240 minutes per shift on the EHR will escalate mental strain and lead to faster burnout for nurses.
“The whole goal of attacking work environments and workflows is to reduce the cognitive load on the nurse,” she said.
“We know it’s important to have them at the bedside. But if we increase their workload by doing that, we’re probably scaring them away.”
To address this challenge, Mercy is implementing mobile solutions with Epic Rover to minimize time spent at a desktop computer, while the company is using augmented intelligence to streamline emergency department handoffs.
By moving from one EHR path to another – doctors, medications, labs, pharmacy and more – the AI-powered system searches through all of the emergency room records to extract the most crucial information and passes it on, literally, to the nurses.
“This recommand section looks at the orders, checks what the physician has signed off on, and puts anything left for the hospital nurse to do and delivers it to her cell phone.”