Ardent Health Services to Deploy AI-Powered, Virtual Nursing Program

What You Should Know:

– Ardent Health Services today announced a partnership with AI-powered ambient monitoring platform care.ai to implement care.ai’s Virtual Nursing solution at Lovelace Medical Center, Ardent’s Albuquerque, New Mexico-based affiliate.

– Ardent, which operates 30 hospitals and nearly 200 sites of care across six states, is among the first of care.ai’s partners to introduce AI-powered nursing.

Virtual Nursing Solution Driving Improved Clinical Outcomes

Part of care.ai’s Smart Care Facility Platform, the Virtual Nursing solution empowers care teams to work more efficiently and drive improved clinical outcomes. Enabled by AI-powered autonomous inferencing and in-room sensors, the platform allows virtual nurses to manage a wide variety of patient care tasks that do not require physical proximity – from routine monitoring and documentation to education, precepting and compliance reporting. This takes the burden off on-site nurses, enabling them to focus more time and attention on the crucial hands-on care that only they can provide. Together, virtual and on-site teams can optimize admission, rounding, discharge and other clinical and operational workflows, which leads to higher patient satisfaction scores, greater staff retention and reduced operating costs.

Combatting Nurse Staffing Shortages

Lovelace’s integration of care.ai’s innovative platform comes at a critical time for health systems, as many face workforce shortages across all levels of care. A nursing workforce analysis published in Health Affairs found that the total supply of RNs decreased by more than 100,000 from 2020 to 2021 – the largest drop observed over the past four decades. Ardent’s integration of care.ai’s Virtual Nursing solution will not only help address these shortages but also fundamentally change the way healthcare is delivered at Lovelace.

The introduction of care.ai’s Virtual Nursing solution at Lovelace will offer nurses more flexibility and expand the pool of nursing staff available. Once onboarded, nurses will be able to automate routine tasks, dedicate more time to patients, and enjoy an enhanced nursing experience. The program also opens up new career paths for experienced nurses who may have physical limitations or prefer a different work environment.

“Nursing workforce shortages and staff retention challenges have taken a major toll on the entire U.S. health system, amplifying how the work required of our caregivers is increasingly becoming humanly impossible,” said care.ai CEO and Founder Chakri Toleti. “Too often, rather than spending time delivering hands-on patient care, bedside nurses are required to redirect a significant portion of their shifts to perform routine tasks like manual data entry and compliance reporting. Our partnership with Ardent to leverage the ambient intelligence capabilities of our smart care platform will deliver a new and enhanced layer of support that empowers Lovelace clinicians to focus their time, efforts and compassion on what they love most about care delivery.”