Stay on top of evolving tech developments in patient care and management.
Advancements in technology are helping healthcare systems to improve clinical outcomes, efficiently track large amounts of patient data, streamline staffing, reduce human error, and give nurses more time for patient care, to name a few.
These three recent technology stories from HealthLeaders will help nurse leaders keep on top of evolving industry developments:
Federal Project Aims to Use Virtual Care to Address Health Inequity
A program in North Carolina aims to research and develop virtual care services that address health inequity.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will use a five-year, $3.73 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's National center for Advancing Translational Sciences to launch the Center for Virtual Care Value and Equity (ViVE).
The project is one of many across the country aiming to apply new technologies and strategies to an ongoing challenge: Breaking down the barriers to care that impact underserved populations. Those barriers are often called social determinants of health, and can include family, work and transportation issues, cultural pressures, technical literacy, and behavioral health concerns.
Digital Health Tech Helps Carilion Children's Monitor NICU Feeding Processes
A children's hospital in Virginia is integrating digital health technology into its neonatal intensive care unit to improve care management for preterm babies and infants with acute medical conditions.
The partnership between Roanoke-based Carilion Children's Hospital and Astarte Medical will enable NICU staff to access the latter's NICUtrition platform, which analyzes patient feeding practices and outcomes to identify feeding protocol effectiveness, patient risk factors, and best practices that can positively impact patient outcomes.
NICUtrition "is able to reflect both longitudinal and real-time patient feeding and growth metrics that help our care teams make evidence-based decisions," Dena Goldberg, PhD, RDN, a clinical dietitian and neonatal specialist at Carilion Children's Hospital, told HealthLeaders. "Because the platform streamlines data-gathering, we no longer have to collect nutrition and growth outcome data by hand and then use statistical software to analyze it. It's not replacing any jobs but augmenting our teams and reducing the burden placed on resources."
Cancer Center Uses Technology to Improve EHR Data Collection for Clinical Trials
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) is embracing new technology designed to enable clinical trial sponsors to quickly and easily pull relevant patient data from MSK's EHR.
The New York City health system is partnering with IgniteData, a UK-based developer of electronic data transfer solutions, to provide data integration between MSK's EHR platform and the platforms used by two major clinical trial sponsors. The company will deploy its Archer technology through the MSK Innovation Hub.
The goal is to streamline and improve what is often a manual process of pulling and verifying data from sometimes different EHRs to support cancer research, boosting the efficiency of these trials, improving the process for selecting and monitoring participants, and eventually leading to better outcomes.
The technology is designed to enable research staff to quickly transfer regulatory grade data such as vital signs and labs—which typically account for as much as half of the data needed—into the sponsor's study database, reducing data entry errors and source data verification and query resolution times.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Technology is being used for better care for underserved populations.
A neonatal intensive care unit is using tech to improve care management for preterm babies and infants with acute medical conditions.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is streamlining what is often a manual process of pulling and verifying data from different EHRs.