How Digital Tools are Addressing Nurse Burnout and Retention with Geoff Nau Altera Digital Health

Geoff Nau, Senior Manager of Product Management for Paragon at Altera Digital Health, highlights how digital health solutions can address the challenges of nurse burnout and retention. AI and machine learning can help automate documentation tasks and streamline workflows to allow nurses better access to patient information. Improving nurse retention requires attention to factors like time-off policies and leveraging technology to give nurses more time to focus on patient care.

Geoff elaborates, "I have been a nurse since 2004. I practiced at the bedside for approximately 15 years. I did pediatric and adult ER as well as NICU. So I started my nursing career on paper and transitioned to electronic. And so in that time, a couple of factors, in the beginning, there was not enough information, and click-intensive. And looking at my travels and going to hospitals and sites today, that challenge is still there as far as access to data relevant to that patient visit, whether it's trending labs, care plans, etc. My experience with most EHRs out there, most of all, is that it’s just click-intensive. A one-size-fits-all is tough to do nowadays."

"There is still a considerable amount of paper out there. When you start getting into these specialized areas like behavioral health, IOP or intensive outpatient, a lot of that, especially if there's anything like a treatment plan, things that may have multiple people needing to touch it, I still see a lot of that on paper. My goal from a solutions perspective is to get as much of that electronic as possible, especially given where we're at with challenges with nursing and staffing. Today, your patient loads go from four to five to one nurse."

"I'm a nurse. I also have a doctorate in organizational psychology. And this was a big study of my focus during my dissertation, where I looked at why people stay on the job as opposed to why they leave. When I first got into nursing, nurses would leave for a dollar. They would go up the street to another facility. But now, having support systems in place allows nurses to take time off, as you said. I know that here, where I live in North Carolina, a couple of institutions are taking a look at their PTO policies. They're looking at their holiday policies and trying to be more flexible. They're working with PRN staffing. In my research, I also found a community component to job embeddedness, if you will, in nursing."

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