HEALTHTECH: How did you become involved in the tech side of healthcare from a nursing background?
A bit of a chance, but also some of my former passions before I got into nursing were always technology and computers. When I got into nursing, I wanted to be able to help make us more efficient and use technology the best we could. When I was a nurse, I didn’t have any computer charting. When I first started at Tampa General, we were just moving to Epic at the time, and I applied for a position there when I was doing my master’s in informatics as well at the same time. It all synergized at once, and I became an Epic analyst to help build the system when we went live about 15 years ago, and then I moved around within IT.
HEALTHTECH: What advice do you have for nurses looking to get more involved in healthcare IT?
Work with your councils, your shared governance. Get involved in projects and then be a champion, a super user. Get yourself out there and help out with those implementations because you’ll get a flavor of what the team is doing on the informatics side or on the IT side, and that will help you make some inroads with those folks.
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HEALTHTECH: What do you think will be a key aspect of nursing education for the next generation?
I think it’s understanding how to use AI. It’s a bit of a buzzword, but it truly is going to transform how nurses deliver care. It’s not there to replace them, but they need to understand how it works, when to use it and when not to. They still need to trust their own clinical judgment and the experiences they learned in nursing school, because it’s their responsibility, not the AI’s, to take care of the patient. So, I think those are some of the big things that we’re trying to get out to our nurses now. While, yes, we are implementing a lot of AI tools to help them be more efficient and help identify clinical outcomes, they need to understand how the tools work and give us that feedback so we can make the tools better.
HEALTHTECH: Ambient listening tools tend to focus on the physician side. But nursing has its own specificities, so what works for doctors may not work for nurses. How did Tampa General Hospital choose its clinical AI assistant solution for nurses?
You hit it right on the head. With nursing, you have to file into specific flow sheets with specific values, so it’s a lot more complicated on the back end for the AI to make sure it’s filing to the right place. Every institution has their own custom flow sheets and different values. Working with Microsoft has been great, so the technology has done relatively well in finding and putting items into the right flow sheets based on the patient conversation. It’s going to be an iterative process — we’ll always have to tweak it and work on it. But, like I said in my talk earlier, I’m hoping this gives the nurses their own personality back, their own uniqueness back in how they’re delivering care to their patients, because they should just be able to speak naturally to the patient about the care they’re delivering or the assessment that they’re doing. And they don’t have to conform —everyone doesn’t have to do it a certain way because the technology will take care of that for them and file it to the right spots in the electronic health record.
HEALTHTECH: Do you have a continuous feedback process? What’s your governance process like? How are you measuring the success of the tool?
We have a good AI governance structure in place to bring in and vet new technologies, and part of that is monitoring the solution. All of our tools have a feedback mechanism embedded into the workflow, so users can write comments or give a thumbs up or thumbs down, and that goes back to the IT side so we can review that feedback and either talk with the vendor or talk with the clinical side about what’s going on, what’s not working or what’s working well. It also creates a structure for our nurses and our other clinicians to talk about their experiences, to help bridge that gap where we are struggling with adoption or use of a tool and how we can make each deployment better.
HEALTHTECH: Can you share an example of nursing feedback in the year since the tool has been deployed?
We have an older institutional building on our main campus, and a lot of rooms there are still semiprivate. The unit that we first went live on was semiprivate. The nurses there were concerned about using the tool because they weren’t sure if there could possibly be a HIPAA violation if other patients could hear them. So, we had a focus group with them and talked through their concerns. We talked with corporate compliance and made sure they were OK and they gave us some guidance. It wasn’t a technical solution, but it was how we addressed feedback and made sure that the team felt supported to use the technology correctly.
READ MORE: How does nursing informatics bridge technology and patient care?
HEALTHTECH: What have you learned at ViVE that will stay with you beyond the conference?
The technology is not the adoption barrier at this point. It’s really the change management from the operational and clinical side that we have to focus on going forward because the pace of change with AI and the other technologies that we’re trying to adopt and push — the care teams are feeling that burden on top of all of their other burdens. But the change is to help them in the long run. So, that’s one major thing that I’m really trying to figure out: What’s the best way to move that forward with our clinical partners? How do we navigate change with them so that they feel comfortable using the new workflow or the new technology? It’s good disruption, but it’s disruption nonetheless.
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