Protecting and Empowering Our Patients & Practitioners Through Tech

America’s sustained COVID-19 case count and hospitalizations continue to create immediate and negative consequences for the health and well-being of our frontline caregivers. After seeing and hearing the stories, including in my own sphere of family and friends, I’m doubling down on this piece about the growing voice patients and practitioners will have, rather, must have in the new world of medicine. The sustained cases are triggering concerns among staff about exposure, PPE shortages, inadequate staffing, and most notable…mental and emotional strain. 

Recently, I spoke about this issue of staff resilience with America’s first Chief Experience Officer, Dr. M. Bridget Duffy, and University Hospital’s Chief Experience Officer, Dr. Joan Zoltanski as part of Velano Vascular's IMPACT State of Healthcare series. These two compassionate healthcare pioneers brought their real-world lens to the challenges facing our care teams today, as well as the technological advances emerging out of a necessity to support these frontline teams.

Doctors Duffy and Zoltanski were adamant in their observations that the pandemic has stripped both humanity and the promise of safety from healthcare. From gut-wrenching decisions about who receives care to facing death in isolation, the human rawness of shouldering this disease has grown more sterile and removed. At the same time, our healthcare workers themselves are staring life and death in the face due to unacceptable gaps in their own safety, just by showing up for work.

The combination of these extreme stressors is causing extended wear and tear on our health care providers, and on the very fabric of our care delivery ecosystem. Many caregivers have already faced months of long shifts, grim emotional experiences, fear of infecting themselves and their families, critical supply shortages, and growing distrust in their workplace. Together, doctors Duffy and Zoltanski aligned on lessons critical to avoiding such future lapses, with the fundamental aim of doing better by our healthcare heroes so they can do better by our loved ones in the hospital bed.

Adequate PPE Supply & Training

The truth is that we’re burning out a generation of doctors, nurses and frontline staff. They were already overloaded before COVID, but now we are asking them to perform the nearly impossible.

To avoid the grim specter of a lost generation, my guests adamantly believe the physical and emotional safety and well-being of our frontline staff must become an urgent and strategic priority for this country. The priority starts with physical safety. You cannot have workers leaving home in the morning wondering if they’ll be adequately protected during the day to walk back through their door at home that same night.

As hard as this dire scenario may be to believe, adequate protection and PPE remains a concern for many hospital systems. Some are still playing catch-up from the early days of the pandemic, while others that avoided a first rush on PPE have been caught flat footed by recent surges and new outbreaks.

Whatever the reason, it’s incumbent upon all hospital leaders to address these shortcomings now – even if they are not currently operating in a hotspot. This virus consistently reminds us of its relentlessness and unpredictability in crippling our community’s well-being. The time to stock up on critical PPE and cross-train physicians and nurses on various functions is before it is needed, not in the throes of the surge.

The Right Tool for the Job

Dr. Duffy made the point that you wouldn’t send a soldier into battle without proper communications equipment. The same holds true for our healthcare heroes. Beyond PPE, nurses and frontline teams need the proper equipment, tools, and technology to keep them safe and connected to their peers.

Dr. Zoltanski shared the example of Vocera’s communications device. Her teams use this technology to communicate effectively throughout the hospital and to avoid multiple caregivers entering a COVID patient’s room at the same time, risking unnecessary exposure. It can also be used to loop patients and their families into conversations using the device.

Dr. Zoltanksi mentioned PIVO™️ as another great example. She noted that systems are using the technology today to avoid having phlebotomists enter a COVID-19 patient room for a blood draw. Not only does that help reduce practitioner exposure, it also aims to conserve PPE by avoiding the need for additional practitioners to gown up.

Whatever the scenario or the tech, it has become increasingly clear that health workers need access to new tools and technology that allow them to treat patients in a more protected and distanced way, while preserving an essential emotional connection.

Humanizing Healthcare Through Technology

This leveraging of tech is equally as important for families amidst the pandemic. We’ve all heard the horrible stories of husbands, wives, sons, and daughters unable to visit or speak with loved ones fighting COVID-19, including those just moments away from their last breath.

Compassionate nurses and frontline teams have instead stepped in to sit with these patients and provide a human touch in these final moments, sometimes even holding phones so that family and friends can share their precious goodbyes. This takes an incredible emotional toll on staff that are already stretched thin, both physically and emotionally. 

Both doctors lamented this reality and pointed to the potential for technology to help fill this void. They agree we need to develop new ways to help humans connect in meaningful ways, even during a pandemic and in light of social distancing.

Faster Regulatory Approvals

To aid in this use of new technology, it is critical that we streamline the traditional rules of regulatory review and approval. To be fair, this has been one of the bright spots of the pandemic.  

Both observed that the pandemic has helped move the government and industry to knock down barriers and fast track innovations such as vaccine development and telehealth already. Looking ahead, the hope is that we can build on this progress and newfound efficiency to establish new standards for regulatory review and approval that will still support safely bringing innovations to market in a much more expedient fashion.

By successfully shortening innovation cycles and approvals, we can work to identify areas of pressure on nurses and then fast track technologies and procedures to alleviate them.

All Frontline Workers Stand Together

Another clear lesson from the early days of the pandemic is that the faltering fabric of our caregiving community is about more than just the fraying of our nursing community. While the burden of the pandemic has largely fallen to them as they step into rooms every day, experiencing real risks for a vast range of medical-related tasks, we must recognize there are other frontline workers engaged in the delivery of care.  

Housekeepers, transport staff, respiratory therapists, phlebotomists, food service professionals, and more are all vital members of our healthcare response team. They have all shared in the risk and burden of this pandemic alongside nurses, some succumbing to the disease themselves. Many are also our most vulnerable populations, often underpaid and sometimes working with little training or inadequate protection.

Both doctors Duffy and Zoltanksi envision a future post-pandemic when all of these frontline workers stand arm-in-arm with nurses and doctors to tell their story and ensure that critical lessons are learned. It is incumbent upon all of us to be part of the conversation that names the invisible healthcare workers and elevates their voices to a point of catalyzing change…now.

Looking Ahead

It is clear to the people working within our healthcare system that the model is broken and in the process of being upended. We are on the front end of that change and it is being driven by the creativity and teamwork of our frontline workers. This shared creativity and experience is one that doctors Duffy and Zoltanksi said has also embedded a fierce collegiality and loyalty among frontline colleagues.

We cannot lose this shared sense of mission or the gains these courageous teams have already made on behalf of humanity. It is critical that we as an industry ensure this transformation becomes realized to empower and sustain our heroes, not simply rely on them.

If we are unable to shake our inertia and simply revert back to the status quo, then we risk forever damaging this profession and dooming our patients to a future where our best and brightest no longer serve at the bedside. If we are successful in normalizing changes such as human-centered tech, an enhanced regulatory process, and adequate staff safety standards into the fabric of our care models, then a truly healthy healthcare model will emerge (for patients and staff, alike). When all is said and done, together we’ll enable a more cost-efficient healthcare that supports and empowers frontline teams rather than shortchanges them.

As stakeholders in the healthcare system, it falls to all of us, whether we are a patient, investor, clinician, business professional, hospital administrator, or caregiver to be bold and courageous in changing what is clearly not working. As Dr. Duffy and Dr. Zoltanksi shared in parting during our conversation: it is our responsibility to speak the truth and speak it loudly.