HCA HealthONE – Virtual Care Center
Hospitals and health systems across Colorado are continuously searching for innovative ways to provide efficient, effective, and high-quality patient care. Additionally, the opportunity to complement nursing teams has changed since COVID-19 and requires a different level of clinical support for bedside teams. As a result, HCA HealthONE launched its Virtual Care Center (VCC) in 2021. The VCC is the first of its kind in HCA HealthONE’s parent company, HCA Healthcare, and offers support resources for hospital-based care teams while centralizing vital patient safety resources to one location. Currently, the VCC supports eight hospitals in the Denver market and has expanded to meet the workload needs of teams.
The center includes the following programs:
- Virtual Sitters: Through remote viewing, virtual sitters provide 24/7 monitoring of approximately 400 patients daily to support clinicians at the bedside. The virtual sitters do not replace the hospital clinical staff, but rather supplements and provides an additional safety layer to monitor specific patients. This allows monitoring of more patients for safety while not removing essential resources from the bedside.
- Virtual Nurse: Thismulti-dimensional program consists of “Guardian RN” and “Ask a Nurse” programs. The Guardian RN program pairs experienced RNs with artificial intelligence to identify at-risk patients prior to a visible change in their clinical condition. This notification allows for early intervention and has resulted in less than 2% of patients requiring a transfer up to an ICU level of care. The “Ask a Nurse” program provides an experienced nursing colleague 24/7 to serve as an additional resource to bedside nurses. The ability to have an experienced, available nurse a phone call away has been a meaningful satisfier to clinical teams.
- Virtual Admit/Discharge Nurse: To increase the amount of time colleagues are at the bedside, HCA HealthONE provides nurses who can virtually complete the admission and/or discharge process for patients. This assistance can provide an additional 30 minutes per patient to the bedside nurse. Given a typical nurse may have two to four patients admit or discharge during a shift the virtual admission/discharge may result in hours back per day.
- Central Monitoring Unit: Centralizing the cardiac telemetry monitoring across Denver’s HCA HealthONE market has created an improved work environment for the vital role Telemetry Technicians (TT) play. TTs monitor heart rhythms and ensure the safety of more than 400 patients per day by working collaboratively in a single space.
To learn more about the Virtual Care Center, please contact Melissa Skinner at [email protected].
