Hi, everyone. This is Lucas Voss with Becker's
Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to
the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. It's fantastic to
have you all on. Today, we're going to
talk about turning clinical data into everyday
action, and I'm very excited to be joined
by two guests today for today's discussion.
Ashley Hunsucker, senior clinical informatics specialist at Conexol,
and Jan Capps, director of clinical services and
outcomes also with Conexol. Ashley and Jan, thanks
so much for being here today. It's great
to have you both.
Hi, Louise. Having us. Yeah. Absolutely. We'll start
with introductions for our audience here. Ashley, why
don't we start off with you? If you
wanna introduce ourselves to our audience and share
a little bit about your work in health
care.
Sure.
My name is Ashley Hunsucker. I'm a registered
nurse, been been in a registered nurse for
over twenty plus years.
I hold a master's degree in clinical nursing
informatics with a clinical background in NICU and
pediatric care.
Those
strong foundational
settings of acute patient centered care
transitioned me over to education for, eight years.
So clinical instructor, teaching didactyl,
on-site clinical rotation simulations,
and informatics,
and shaping that next generation of nurses is
very important to me. Rolled over and transitioned
into informatics back in 2020
where natural evolution of the bedside and education
spun into informatics
and has helped build,
and center foundation for me inside of that
patient, centered care to support our nurses into
health care technology.
So excited to hear all of your perspectives
on this. Very excited. Jan, I'll hand it
over to you for introductions as well.
Sure. Thanks, Lucas.
My name is Jan Capps. As I said,
I get to, be the pleasure of leading
our clinical team here at Connexal.
I'm a registered nurse by background. I've been
a nurse for twenty seven years. I've been
in the health care space for
a little over thirty,
traditional bedside nursing, emergency department, cath lab, interventional
radiology,
really was, quite interested in operations and hospital
operations specifically. So
several leadership opportunities within that space,
also in the ambulatory
space, and then crossed over to the dark
side of IT Mhmm. And spent the second
half of my career,
leading
EMR implementations,
ancillary systems implementations,
and really love that space
between,
technology and the bedside caregiver. So informatics
was just a natural fit
and,
moved over into that space. So, again, you
get the opportunity to
leverage what you know at the bedside, what
you've learned through operations,
blend that with IT, and that's the recipe
for informatics. So that's why we're here.
Absolutely. I think it's so great too because
you know what insights really count from your
own experience at the bedside, which is very,
very important, and that's sort of what I
wanna start off with here too. When it
comes to improving care delivery,
those actionable insights are so important
at the bedside. Having them at the bedside,
having them available is is so important.
Ashley, I wanna start with you here. Can
you walk us through why that's so important
and how clinical teams can operationalize
those insights
in a way that aligns with their existing
workflows?
Yeah. Sure.
So actual insight is extremely important when you're
building workflows for those end users. So making
the right decisions
and leading into that design of workflow, we
use real data and on-site assessments here at
Connexal,
and that helps provide
us the clinical informatics, the insight using that
qualitative and quantitative
data
so that we can look and assess and
identify those actual gaps
that might be contributing to breaking down
the adoption for the end user. So
we look at how the end user is
being effective. Right? So when we start there,
it allows for that more organic
approach rather than pushing
some sort of software or technology out and
then it's gonna abruptly disrupt things. We look
at how can we soft launch this into
their day and,
deploy it to fit within their day and
create,
not so much impact of their normal natural
organic workflow for the end user.
Yeah. The least disruption possible, I think. Correct.
Correct. One of the keys there.
Jen, just a follow-up to this.
How do you ensure then those insights remain
relevant across organizations?
Well, it's it's not really a set it
and forget it mentality. You have to go
back. You have to monitor. You have to
refine.
You know, technology is is is a good
thing. It it can be a tremendous asset
when it's properly leveraged.
But with that, you have to be mindful
that with all these advances in tech, there's
just an overwhelming amount of information
that the bedside caregiver is just being bombarded
with. And a lot of that's not
actionable, meaning it's not gonna drive a meaningful
interaction between the patient and the caregiver.
And with all of these changes, I mean,
things change in practice.
You may introduce a new piece of technology.
It just really
highlights the fact that this has to be
an ongoing journey.
You have to be nimble enough to change.
You as Ashley said, you've gotta lean into
your data. You've got to do observations,
and you have to be willing to ask
yourself the hard question, which is,
do I need to change the way I'm
doing my day to day work? And if
so,
what parts of that workflow can be be
influenced
and when?
And so, again, it just really sets you
up for that ongoing process improvement journey, and
data is such a a key point of
that.
Looking at how your system's operating,
you know, surveying and interviewing your teams, getting
their feedback,
and just really taking all of those inputs
for that continuous process improvement. It's very important.
Yeah. And and, Jen, you you touched on
a very important point. I think this can
get overwhelming.
Right? It's one of those things that there's
so much, there there's potential to for it
to be overwhelming.
What role does collaboration
between clinical and technical teams play during implementation
and optimization
phases,
and what should what conversations should teams have
early on to maybe
avoid some of that overwhelming
feeling and being able to really operationalize this?
Well, I mean, collaboration is just huge. And
if you spend any time with me at
all, you'll find out that I say repeatedly
clinically
and operationally
led projects and IT enabled.
Mhmm. And you've really gotta lean into the
expertise of both groups.
They need to be at the table early,
and this really even goes back before you
implement.
Yeah. You need to have,
clinical and IT
alignment at that c suite all the way
down,
and be involved in those decisions around system
selection. I mean, that's huge for buy in,
throughout the project prior to even just getting
into the implementation
phases.
But, obviously, once you get to implementation,
it's, again, it's taking that time
to,
for the clinical
team to understand
how the tech
should work or potentially
could work and then vice versa.
You need to understand what the day to
day life is of the person that's gonna
be using the tech. That's how you guide
thoughtful design sessions and and decisions. And and,
again, with Connexal, that's that's one of the
things that our informaticists do. We're we're that
liaison and that bridge during the implementation
and and through optimization
on helping guide those conversations and bringing those
various stakeholders together.
Yeah. And only then can something happen that
Ashley mentioned earlier in the conversation, right, the
least amount of disruption for everybody and and
being able to support those workflows. I think
that's that's very important.
Ashley, I wanna come back to you here.
You talked about, you know, the importance of
feedback loops and and continuous
improvement quite a bit.
Can you talk about what methods of feedback
have worked well,
and what's been most effective in driving engagement
and sustaining improvements over time?
Sure. Sure. So first off, it's for us,
it's not just about launching a system. It's
about setting it up to truly work for
the people that are using it. So back
to Jan mentioning that engaging and collaboration
early and often,
One of the key some of the key
things that we do I don't wanna say
there's just one because they're all really independent
on each other.
So we survey
very early on in engagement. We survey the
frontline staff. So we wanna hear from them.
We wanna hear all the pains, all the
the frustrations,
all the things. We wanna hear it. And
we also ask questions that are more culture
related and adopt as far as how things
are being used,
not just on their alarms, but maybe with
their devices and things of that nature, policies,
procedures. We wanna take a look at everything.
From that information, then we start internally
dissecting it out, looking at still the data,
looking at the responses from staff, trying to
see where there are those gaps. But we
we discuss potential pitfalls and things of that
with leadership, which is a great way to
help open the communication but identify it so
we can close those gaps. We additionally,
going through the go live post go live,
we opt do optimization with the staff,
follow-up with them on-site, continue to have,
face to face interviews and feedback,
getting information from them, watching them how this
deployment is engaging in their day to day,
what can we do better to take it
back to the team of our, customer to
give them
our our suggestions of this is what we
saw, this is what may could help. It
could be there's an education gap that we
need to revisit.
So starting to look for ways to close
those gaps
helps close the loop and keeps those continuous
measures. We're always looking at the data, so
I run, data
reports from prior to go live, during go
live. Go live is always, you know, shaky
ground, so we we try not to get
too hung up on. We want the dust
to settle a little bit for staff to
really kinda settle in so we can look
at that repetitive behavior
to see why things may not be working
to the optimization piece. So that's how we
try to close those loops. And it's been
pretty well received.
Having those executive summaries available for leadership to
take to the levels they need to for
support is is helpful as well.
Yeah. And I just wanted to follow-up on
this too. Has there anything you have these
conversations, and you have these, on implementation all
the time.
From that feedback that you've gotten, is there
are there any learnings or insights that have
surprised you, Ashley, in this process?
Nothing surprises me, Lucas.
I I would too so. Yes.
Nothing surprises me. You have to be you
have to be ready to pivot all the
time. Yeah.
Nothing surprises me at this point. I'm surprised
when things go as planned. That's probably the
surprise.
You have the data. Right? There shouldn't be
any surprises.
Right. And it's interesting because the data,
you look at it and you're like, well,
this is what I'm seeing. And so when
you when you're able to con confirm that
that's truly what's happening on the floors and
the units,
so then we have to peel the layer
back. Why is this happening?
Yeah. How can we change this behavior? How
can we reduce this?
How can we get this, rate higher? Those
kind of things. So the data supports it,
but it's only one half of the picture
really going and seeing how it is
yes. We can we can look to see,
okay, these are the big things I'm looking
at in your data. Now let's get on-site
and really dig down into into the weeds
with this.
Yeah. Jan, same for you. I I'd love
to hear from you as well from sort
of the feedback that you're hearing, the conversations
that you're having.
Are there any learnings or insights that that
surprise you, or is it the same thing?
Nothing surprises
you. I mean, I had to laugh when
Ashley said that because she stole my answer,
quite frankly. I mean There you go.
This
just when you think you've seen it all.
But, no. Nothing really surprises me. What what
I do like about, you know, the space
that we work in is
you always go into it with the best
intentions,
and there's always an opportunity
to learn and grow with each implementation.
And so being able to pick up those
lessons learned and share them with other people
within our community, whether it's a customer, whether
it's just networking with our peers,
that's how we grow as a profession,
and that's how we're able to continue to
make a a positive impact
with these health care implementations,
with workflow optimization.
And so
any of those surprises
really turn into nuggets of lessons learned.
Absolutely. And I think that's a great way
to end our podcast episode today with these
nuggets learned. Jen and Ashley, thank you so
much for your time and insights today. This
was a fantastic conversation. Thanks for being here.
Yeah. Thank you, Lucas.
Yeah. Thanks. We appreciate the opportunity and and
being a guest.
Absolutely. We also want to thank our podcast
sponsor, ConnexAll. You can tune in to more
podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our podcast
page at beckershospitalreview.com.