Intermountain Health is overhauling its care model to reshape how nursing care is delivered and increase the share of time nurses spend at the bedside to 42%.
System leaders are redesigning and simplifying nurse workflows, and using technology to reduce routine work.
“The goal is that our nurses spend less time navigating unnecessary work and more time practicing nursing,” Mandy Richards, DNP, RN, chief nursing executive Salt Lake City-based system and president of Intermountain Children’s Health, said in an upcoming episode of Becker’s “Clinical Leadership Podcast.” “My hope is that patients see something’s different. They’ve got more time with their nurse, they’re building stronger relationships as a result, and we’re offering more personalized experiences because nurses have more time to spend with them.”
Dr. Richards and her team worked with about 150 nurses and patient care techs from across the system to find the best ways to transform workflows, not just make them more efficient.
“[Efficiency is] trying to do the same work, but faster,” she said. “Transformation is looking at how we do work in a completely new way. Efficiency models are pretty difficult because they focus on one process at a time. Transformation looks at the entire care model and at multiple changes.”
A time-motion study of more than 7,000 observations across Intermountain’s med-surg units found nurses spent 24% of their time at the bedside, with much of the rest going to charting and other computer work, medication administration and care coordination. The care model redesign aims to increase time at the bedside to 42%.
“I hope our nurses will look back and say this was the moment we started redesigning a healthcare system around patients, around our caregivers and around the future of nursing,” she said. “I want our nurses to feel that the systems and workflows are working for them, not against them. … But most importantly, I want our nurses to feel they can practice top of license and go home knowing they were able to provide the care they came into nursing to give, and feel the joy come back into nursing: the joy of caring for patients and the feeling that they’re making a difference.”
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