-
- Nuance is a pioneer
and a leading provider of conversational AI
and cloud-based, ambient clinical intelligence
for healthcare providers used by 77% of hospitals
and 10,000 healthcare organizations worldwide.
Our AI powered solutions capture 300 million patient
stories each year.
We help unburdened clinicians, radiologists,
and care teams with efficient new ways
to capture clinical information,
applying real time intelligence
for better decision making across the continuum of care.
Now a Microsoft company Nuance brings industry leading
generative AI and deep vertical expertise.
To address your biggest challenges
and accelerate healthcare outcomes, visit
www.nuance.com/healthcare for more information.
- Welcome everyone
to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series.
I'm Mariah Mohammed, writer
and moderator with Becker's Healthcare,
and I'm absolutely thrilled to have with me today Dr.
FJ Campbell, chief Medical Officer at Arden Health Services.
Doctor, it's very nice to have you on the podcast.
To get us started, would you mind please introducing
yourself and telling us a bit about your background?
- Sure. FJ Campbell, again,
I'm the Chief Medical Officer of Arden Health Services.
I'm an emergency medicine p by training
and effectively guided to administration along the way
to improve throughput.
Um, that started off with VIR Health, then I went on to HCA
and CHS, uh,
and now I'm at Arden Health Services, where I'm responsible
for our clinical initiatives.
- Wonderful. Thank you so much
for giving us that background.
So to jump right into our conversation today,
can you tell me about your most successful project
or initiative from the last year?
What issues were you trying to solve
and also what drove the success?
- Sure, no question about it.
As we have been coming out of covid, um,
and really thinking about workforce demands, uh,
it really demonstrated to us
that there has become an untenable amount of work
for our nursing staff.
And we began to really question what are the elements
of nursing workflow that we could literally automate?
And that work has taken place in our Amarillo market at BSA,
where we have endeavored
to automate the collection of vital signs.
Uh, our partner in that is a company
called Bio Intelligence.
Their product is bio button.
Uh, we've also done that in conjunction with Medtronic.
And uh, the bio button is placed on patients
and we have the automated collection of heart rates,
respiratory rates, and temperature.
Um, two success stories come out of this.
Number one, it's reducing some of the tasks,
the mundane tasks at the bedside that occupy workflow
for our nurses and our patient care technicians.
Uh, but with 1,440 measurements per day per patient, it has
provided a profound amount of data that is now going into
our deterioration index called Alert Watch,
which is much more effectively identifying
patients who are deteriorating.
And we have seen as a result, uh, a reduction in length
of stay and a reduction in mortality major success for us.
So that was the last year,
and we're in the process of rolling that out to
further facilities.
We've completed it in our Tulsa market,
and we'll be going to East Texas next.
- Wonderful, wonderful.
Thank you so much for giving us, uh, that insight.
And the next question I wanted to ask you is, as you know,
the clinical workforce has changed a lot in the last few
years for obvious reasons.
Uh, what challenges are you still facing
and how do you see the clinical workforce evolving?
- We're gonna have a virtual workforce working alongside
an onsite workforce.
Um, we've been talking about telehealth for decades now,
and it's been very much focused on physicians.
Um, again, a byproduct of our experience coming out
of Covid, uh, was reflecting on the bedside care
paradigm for both nurses and for patient care technicians.
Um, we've been working with a company called Care ai.
Um, we're in the midst of deploying 400 plus, um,
telehealth sensors per, um,
room across our East Texas market.
And the goal there is to actually drive virtual nurses,
virtual techs and virtual attendings.
Uh, this is about load balancing workflow for nurses,
but also load, uh, balancing acuity
and patient volumes across, uh, a whole market.
And our hub and spoke model.
When we look at the virtual nurses,
we are specifically thinking again, what can we do
to improve the workflows for our nurses
and technicians working in the hospital?
And we thought we could deploy virtual nurses
who could take care of elements of the admission process,
medication reconciliation, rounding the discharge process,
creating an environment where the nurses
who are now present on site are not going to have to be
so profoundly task focused
that they can concentrate more on critical thinking.
And that's what we think is going to lead
to a safer environment, both for our patients, our nurses,
and our techs as they're trying
to execute on their patient care.
When we realized that we could do that for nurses, we began
to realize we could also extend this to bringing
attendings from our tertiary care centers
to our secondary hospitals for a multitude
of clinical service lines to
therefore increase the capability of our secondary hospitals
and open up capacity to our tertiary care centers
to take more patients in from the community.
- Wonderful, wonderful.
Thank you so much for giving us that insight.
And Doctor, before I let you go, what is your best advice
for aspiring physician and nurse leaders?
- We have become nearly
symbiotic with technology.
I know that's a dramatic statement.
We no longer look at things like Epic as an EMR.
It really has become our clinical operating system.
Um, and there are increasingly will be tools that are going
to allow us to go through a tremendous amount
of patient data and really bring us down
to the pertinent positives and the pertinent negatives.
And that's gonna be happening in the nursing front.
That's gonna be happening in the physician front.
There's a new skillset that people are going to have
to really embrace.
It's not just how well you take a history.
It's not just how well you come up
with differential diagnosis
or how well you do a physical exam.
There's also going to be a skill
and people are really gonna have to commit to learning
the new skills around how do I leverage the tech,
leverage the technology around me to most effectively
and efficiently take care of the patients that I have.
So that is something that people associate with, Hey,
you're going to be able
to more effectively do your workflows if you gain
mastery over EMR.
But there are gonna be new systems
that are gonna be driving this clinical decision support
systems, artificial intelligence systems,
and having that comfort level
and having that understanding of necessity
to gain mastery over these new technology systems,
information systems coming in.
I think people are gonna have to really know
that their success
and their happiness in this work
will involve embracing these technologies.
- Yes. Thank you so much for those final thoughts, doctor.
This has definitely been an amazing
and informative discussion.
So again, I wanna thank you so much
for coming on Becker's Healthcare
and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
- My pleasure. Take care.
- Nuance is a pioneer
and a leading provider of conversational AI in cloud-based,
ambient clinical intelligence for healthcare providers used
by 77% of hospitals
and 10,000 healthcare organizations worldwide.
Our AI powered solutions capture 300 million patient
stories each year.
We help unburdened clinicians, radiologists,
and care teams with efficient new ways
to capture clinical information,
applying real time intelligence
for better decision making across the continuum of care.
Now a Microsoft company Nuance brings industry leading
generative AI and deep vertical expertise.
To address your biggest challenges
and accelerate healthcare outcomes, visit
www.nuance.com/healthcare for more information.