Artificial intelligence is "perfectly positioned" to ease the workload for nurses and give them time back at the bedside, a chief nursing officer told Becker's.
Betty Jo Rocchio, DNP, CRNA, senior vice president and chief nurse executive of St. Louis-based Mercy, said the 30-hospital system has been using AI to help nurses pick up extra shifts and reduce time in the EHR.
With a nursing shortage expected to continue for at least another decade, "we're going to have to design care delivery differently," she said. Nurses wanting to leave the profession often cite being sick of all the administrative work unrelated to patient care.
AI has the ability to transform "workforce, workflows and work environment," Dr. Rocchio said.
For the past year and a half, Mercy has offered an AI-powered workforce app that makes extra shifts available to nursing employees, gig workers and agency nurses, informing them exactly how much each shift will pay.
"What's going on in the background is AI is producing not only the shift but the amount of extra money that's launched onto that shift," she said. "It's all math in the background delivered through AI." Nurses, she said, "can now pick up shifts on their phone."
Mercy is also employing the technology for nurse handoffs. AI generates reports on patients being admitted to the hospital from the emergency department.
"Those recommendations come from the physician notes, the nursing notes and any ancillary notes that happen in the emergency department," Dr. Rocchio explained. "So it's standardized, it's automated, it's delivered to the nurse's phone so it's convenient, and it's a full complement of the things they need to do next once they hit the floor.
Despite nurses protesting AI in other parts of the country, Dr. Rocchio said she has not received pushback on the technology at Mercy. She believes that's because the health system looked to AI to solve problems brought up by nurses and included nurses in each step of the adoption process.
"We didn't sit at a corporate level and decide how we were going to do this," she said. "We're not just out there putting AI into workflows. Nurses asked for it. They were involved in the implementation."
With the AI-generated nurse handoffs, Mercy took it slow, starting with a single unit at one hospital and growing the program from there, Dr. Rocchio said.
"We verified that the information was coming across correctly, that they had everything they needed," she said. "And we had nurses who were verifying right at the frontlines with us so they knew how it was being generated. We went through a full-scale education and implementation with them. And we continue to do so."
"The education, the transparency, the follow up and having them involved in it were key," she added.
The biggest concern Dr. Rocchio hears is from nurses worried the technology is going to take their jobs. Her response: "Absolutely not."
"AI will never replace the caring human touch of nurses," she said. "Now we have more information to make better decisions that we would have had to scour the electronic medical record for. So it actually gives nurses time back to do what nursing was intended to do, which is take care of patients."
Dr. Rocchio gets buy-in from other leaders because of what she called AI's "return on value." The nurse handoff tool, for instance, has reduced nurses' EHR time by 20%, giving them that much more time at the bedside.
She also anticipates those returns showing up in improved nurse retention and "human experience" scores.
"By human experience, I'm talking about our caregiver engagement scores plus our patient experience scores," she said. "I'm hoping we'll see both of those in our health system really reach just the very top decile performers in the nation."