HELENA \u2014 Just over a year ago, St. Peter\u2019s Health says it became the first hospital in Montana to implement virtual nursing as an expansion of the patient care team.<\/p>\n
Kari Koehler, the chief nursing officer at St. Pete\u2019s, said, \u201cBeing able to bring the virtual nurse in is really about providing support.\u201d Support for bedside nurses and patients at all hours of the day.<\/p>\n
The virtual nursing program was launched to help address the growing shortage of nurses and reduce burnout among the nursing staff. Now, retention of RNs has increased by 50 percent.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Madelyn Heath, MTN News<\/p>\n
Virtual nurses enter hospital rooms at all hours of the day for when care is needed.<\/p>\n
Nurse Paige Plancich said, \u201cWe have a lot of patients that need a lot of things, and sometimes it is really hard to spend half an hour on an admission or a half an hour to an hour on a discharge, and so having somebody be able to be that catchall has been very helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Virtual nurses are somewhat similar to telehealth technology-wise wise but are solely used for inpatients rather than outpatients with scheduled appointments.<\/p>\n
\u201cVirtual nursing, just like a nurse at the bedside, they can come in and out of your room as needed,\u201d Koehler said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Madelyn Heath, MTN News<\/p>\n
Webcams and the hospital room television are how patients interact with virtual nurses.<\/p>\n
Virtual nurses interact with patients using a webcam and the room’s television, documenting patient information in real-time, and are available 24\/7 to relieve some of the duties of the bedside crew.<\/p>\n
Plancich said, \u201cIt is important to know that we work as one.\u201d<\/p>\n
For St. Peter\u2019s Health, this is just one innovative step they are taking to shape the future of healthcare in Montana.<\/p>\n
\u201cMontana tends to be behind sometimes with technology, so it is really exciting that we can bring this care and more technology to the state as a whole,” Koehler said.<\/p>\n
Virtual nurses have provided St. Peter\u2019s patients with more than 30,000 hours of care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HELENA \u2014 Just over a year ago, St. Peter\u2019s Health says it became the first hospital in Montana…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41821,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[6036,571,5078,27754,202,204,203,27753,199,201,200,27755],"class_list":["post-41820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-care","tag-health","tag-hospital","tag-nurse","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-peters","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-virtual"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}