AI Nurse Assistants Have Arrived

Background:  The Crisis of Overburdened Nurses
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The digitization of healthcare has fallen hardest on nurses.  Because they’re at the front line of patient care, they’ve been pushed to do more and more administrative work in more and more systems.

A UPMC study found nurses spend ⅓ of their time in digital systems (Source) – an estimate that actually sounds low given that other research has found up to 41% of time spent in the EHR alone (Source).ere are the grim statistics about the toll EHR documentation takes on nurses:‍

600–800 data points are documented during a typical 12-hour shift Source

69% blame poor EHR usability for job dissatisfaction Source

Clinician burnout is directly tied to documentation burden Source

45% of inpatient nurses plan to leave their jobs in the next 6 months Source

“We’ve had a history in healthcare of pushing technology out to nurses without really ensuring it supports nursing workflow and practice,” said Kathleen Harmon, MS, RN, Clinical Innovation Advisor at Aiva in an interview with AVIA Health.

Implementation Keys:  Interfaces, Informatics and Training

When you implement an AI nurse assistant like Aiva, three important resources are the Interfaces, Informatics and Training teams.

Aiva relies on a client’s Interfaces team to help map voice commands to the right flowsheet rows.  Their actual time commitment should be less than 10 hours, but, as everyone knows, those Interfaces folks are always busy and hard to book, so you’ll want to schedule ahead of time.

The Informatics team is in high demand too, and they’ll probably spend between 10-20 hours on testing (to make sure the Aiva is writing correctly to the right flowsheet rows) and then 6-8 hours on training users.

Training is straightforward, thanks to the ease of using voice and people’s increasing familiarity with conversational AI.  However, not everyone embraces new ways of doing things, even when those new ways save them time.  Just the act of speaking observations on the go rather than settling down at a workstation to type them in can take some nurses a day or two to get used to.  For the hesitant, Aiva clients have had success encouraging them to start slowly – just doing one or two flowsheets at first and then adding more as their comfort grows.  This approach has been very effective, with many of the most wary nurses jumping to the top of their unit’s utilization leaderboard within a week!

Comfort and utilization also grow as clients add more functionality to Aiva Nurse Assistant.  For example, many clients will start with their most heavily used 100 rows.  They then steadily add more rows, along with features like pulling data from the EHR (labs, vitals, schedules, orders, et al), setting reminders and compliance nudges.  It makes sense:  the more things an app can do for you, the more you use it – a virtuous circle that only grows when you add conversational control of policies & procedures, dietary and work orders, interpreter services and other systems Aiva connects with.