Leveraging Mobile To Bring Caregivers Back To The Patient Bedside

By Mike Lanciloti, VP, product management, Spectralink

On any given day, nurses are caregivers, psychiatrists, comforters, teachers, and friends. In fact, the critically important role nurses play in the patient recovery process is difficult to define – and hard to imagine doing without. It is one of the hardest jobs in the world.

And it’s getting harder, as the demands on nurses are continuing to increase. They are faced daily with stringent readmission penalties, new patient care models, and harder-to-achieve metrics on patient satisfaction and outcomes.

Nurses are also under pressure to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate care more effectively across a wider array of team members. Unfortunately, continuous colleague interruptions, increased documentation requirements, and alert and alarm fatigue can leave nurses with little time for direct patient care at the bedside.

A recent conversation with a nurse revealed that, during an eight-hour shift, she was only able to spend about an hour with her patients. That is patients, plural, meaning she only was able to spend about 10-15 minutes with each.

Technology is supposed to aid nurses in their jobs, not create additional administrative work. Yet, if you think about the number of devices nurses need with them on any given day – a phone or two, a scanner, a pager, a computer, a radio – not to mention the software they must use, you can start to understand how nurses have been taken away from their main task: helping patients heal.

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