Article Summary:
- Nurses balance a tricky combination of patient care and administrative business needs to support the health system process.
- There are opportunities to improve patient care coordination by better understanding what nurses are frequently being asked and tasks frequently being handled.
- AI dives deeper into patient conversations to discover trends, obstacles, and areas of improvement to address ways to best optimize nurses’ time in supporting the patient experience.
- AI can help optimize nurses’ time by:
- Identifying and monitoring the top reasons patients are calling.
- Redirecting administrative burden.
- Deploying the right resources at the right time.
Nurses are on the front lines of defense in keeping us healthy. This role balances patient care alongside administrative needs – a tricky combination. It’s an undeniably challenging, but critical function, for healthcare systems.
To connect patients to nurses, many health systems utilize a nurse call line to have a centralized place to connect patients and nurses. This type of call line is important in navigating the patient inside a complex healthcare ecosystem.
Due to this positioning, nurses field a wide and varied set of calls with a diverse set of questions, inquiries, and needs. Rather than using their expertise to answer medical questions, nurses are burdened with administrative tasks, such as scheduling or confirming appointments. This leads to lost time, limits nurses’ capacity to treat medical inquiries, and impacts health system revenue.
To ensure smooth handoff and patient experience, it’s critical that leaders invest in efficient and effective ways to leverage nurse expertise in ways that are most impactful. AI is emerging as a potential way to solve these current barriers and challenges nurses face daily. These tools provide opportunities to optimize nurses’ time with the ability to analyze and aggregate large volumes of data to pinpoint where and how improvements can be made.
Improve Coordination of Care Across a Patient Journey
Improved coordination starts with optimizing your nurses’ time. Commonly, nurse lines see high volumes of calls because nurses are viewed simultaneously as medical professionals and administrators, and patients are looking for quick answers inside a complex environment. Nurses find their time being sucked into more administrative-related tasks versus providing clinical care. Patients are reaching out every day to manage appointments, discuss billing issues, follow-up on their post treatment plans, and more.
Due to high volume and varied inquiries, nurse call lines see breakage in the chain of communication as handovers or follow-ups are lost in the accountability process due to capacity constraints.
A common roadblock to tackle these challenges? Uncertainty on what the roadblocks are:
- What questions are being asked?
- Where are common areas of confusion?
- Who is calling the nursing line?
- What is triggering schedulers to send a call to a nurse?
- What kinds of calls are nurses spending the most time on?
Harness Nurse Call Line Conversations
Turn every day nurse line conversations into insights. Conversation data is a crucial source of insights that you already have access to (and AI can help you access that data). Recorded nurse line conversations contain everything needed to develop data-backed business plans that center patient needs and operational efficiency.
Analyzing nurse call lines surfaces the leading indicators of treatment abandonment, missed payments, and identify outside factors that impact appointment no-shows to better deliver options that work for your patients and your staff.
AI helps you dive deeper into emerging trends and move upstream to call line issues that are impacting where nurses are spending most of their time. Simply, healthcare systems are better able to locate themes and disruptions, plan a strategy to address them, and act on solutions in real-time. Conversation data comprises of all the recorded interactions that patients have with nurses, including phone calls, emails, and online chat sessions. Every interaction holds valuable insights and information that can help hospital systems understand the needs and preferences of their patients and better support their nurses on calls. This not only helps enhance the patient experience, but provides relief against employee burnout as nurses manage countless requests and tasks at all hours of the day.
3 Ways to Optimize Nurses’ Time with AI
Nurses are vital in treating and following-up with patients. Their time is valuable and optimizing that time and attention bring enormous benefit to both patients being served and health systems. AI helps identify and consolidate trends for easy monitoring and brings context to recurring patient conversation topics that helps uncovers broken processes, redirects communications, lessens administrative burden, and supports clinical needs for the nursing staff to be effective. Three (3) ways AI helps optimize nurses’ time are:
- Identifying and monitoring top call drivers. An important first step is to understand what is triggering calls in the first place (call drivers). By analyzing top call drivers, proactive steps can then be taken to reduce call volume. AI can analyze and summarize a high volume of conversations to report on trends, frequency, and conversation topic summaries. This provides an opportunity to understanding who is calling, where time is being spent, and what are recurring asks from the nurses on call.
- Redirecting administrative burden. Once top call drivers are identified, steps can be taken to ease the administrative burden placed on nurses. New processes and procedures can help redirect certain calls to keep nurses focused on administering clinical care. Nursing call lines can come alongside other patient support lines to establish best practices and aligned call guides to help ensure teams are prepared to work together. AI helps identify recurring tasks, how much time is currently being spent on recurring tasks, and provide guidance on what changes could drive the highest impact in increasing capacity and saving time.
- Deploying the right resources at the right time. Nurses are clinical practitioners. Their time is best served in caring for patients following a diagnosis or identified care plan. In understanding current sources of frustration, for both patients and nurses, leaders can strategically focus their process improvements. AI can be an important tool to monitor process improvements and to ensure the right resources are deployed at the right time.
Support patient treatment plans, improve time to revenue, and drive operational efficiencies with AI and machine learning purpose-built for healthcare providers. With Authenticx, view conversation trends over time and in real-time with generative AI capabilities.
Health system leaders need to feel confident in how their clinical nurse staff and patient support functions are being utilized. Authenticx was founded to surface meaningful insights from conversation data. Our blend of NLU, LLM, and deep learning models ensure the full context present in every conversation is captured, so you can address the root cause of any issue.
Quantify what barriers are costing you and optimize nurses’ time with Authenticx
Learn how Authenticx helps leaders optimize their nurse call lines to best serve their patient populations by guiding them efficiently and effectively at every step of the patient journey.
Related Resources
Authenticx for Providers and Hospitals | How SDOH Impacts Scheduling | Patient Experience in Hospitals | Clinical and Administrative Obstacles and Opportunities
About Authenticx
Authenticx is the new standard for humanizing conversational intelligence in healthcare by analyzing millions of customer interactions (like voice, chat, or emails) to surface immersive and intelligent insights at scale. Authenticx was founded to aggregate, analyze and activate customer interaction data to surface transformational opportunities in healthcare. Using existing data that’s likely being stored and ignored in your organization, Authenticx reveals hidden barriers, motivators, and strategies so healthcare organizations can make confident, data-backed decisions. In 2023, Authenticx was ranked No. 349 on the Inc. 5000 recognized as one of America and Indiana’s fastest-growing private companies.
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