Making each patient’s journey — from admission to discharge — exceptional in every way.
What matters most to us is giving people the absolute best healthcare possible. From caregiver cross-training to nurse advocacy and best practices, every innovation at the bedside directly impacts every piece of the patient care experience. And we are here to champion that innovation.
Delivering the best patient experience not only depends on the operations in place, but also on the caregivers who bring our purpose to life. At our facilities, the roles and responsibilities of each colleague are being carefully aligned to deliver excellence and the highest quality care available. We are also leveraging the expertise of our current care teams to elevate creative solutions and instill people-first practices. Providing access to industry-leading education and evidence-based operations sets our teams and their patients up for the best outcomes possible.
Patient outcome priorities
Our ability to provide safe and effective care starts with our trusted care teams. By means of communicating efficiently, offering next best actions and coordinating these actions across teams, we seek to solve delays, inform the full care team and automate many administrative functions to allow the time spent with patients to be more meaningful.
Diversifying and optimizing the workforce:
We leverage and scale alternative care-delivery methods to ease the burden on nurses and manage staffing shortages. New roles help support nursing workload, including those of LPNs, nurse externs and paramedics.
- Alternate model care practices (LPNs, paramedics)
- Market float pools
- Patient safety attendant (sitter) reduction
- Nurse externs (LPN, paramedic)
Enhancing nursing communication:
We are improving access to patient data via digital platforms that boost communication efficiency and provide real-time visibility to critical medical records.
- Swift and accurate shift handoff
- Digital safety huddle information at a unit level
- R.N. results review via PatientKeeper software
Optimizing technology:
We invest in the latest, most innovative technologies to promote the best outcomes for our patients and improve patient safety.
- Wound care imaging**
- TeleTracker*: real-time patient tracking
- Next-Gen Analytics for Treatment and Efficiency (NATE)
- MobiLab specimen collection tool*
- Medication management and Pyxis integration
*Dependent on key partners
**Dependent on funding approval
Innovative technologies
Our Care Transformation and Innovation (CT&I) teams constantly pursue improvements across patient flow and operational practices. This allows nurses to spend more time at the bedside to efficiently move patients toward the care they need. Advancing care models and skill mixes means that facility leadership, direct care providers, and patients and their families will experience new innovative technologies. This includes machine interoperability, shared data usage after individual input, and core documentation elements.
Patient care opportunities:
Prototype solutions that bring all labor data together in one system are under development in labor and delivery units. The one system describes the current state of labor and the baby’s condition, sharing the information with all team members. This allows real-time awareness and enables machine learning to predict labor progress for the next four hours.
Caregiver training:
An environment of shared training produces consistent competency, proficiency and mastery of new technologies. By expanding our focus to the care team and the ways in which teams work together in a new digital space, we are developing inter-professional collaborative competencies, shared decision-making and side-by-side/ at-the-bedside incorporation of new AI-informed data.
At other hospitals where I’ve done rotations, everything is on paper. But at Good Samaritan, I can input information [digitally] through easily accessible quick links. I can do my charting, make requests and write reports – all electronically. It’s quicker and more efficient. Because of this process, I have more time to spend with my patients, and it helps greatly with throughput.— Tiffany Ehlers, R.N., Good Samaritan Hospital, San Jose, Calif.
Staffing assistance:
A newly embedded Digital Care Team member (a software solution like Alexa or Siri) can now partner with human care team members. This organizes workflow, finds data, and supports communication and collaboration among care team members. It can even complete some simple tasks like documentation on behalf of the team.
Technology development:
Our Innovation Hubs (two hospitals training to be sites for CT&I work) are alpha testing new models and technologies, and are becoming skilled at serving in the role of clinician innovators. An Emulator displays our alpha test products within the natural workflow of the leader or provider. This allows us to test new technologies and models of care alongside the current method. The goal: to continually improve our computation models, build trust with the care team and identify concerns early in the development cycle.
