Virtual Nursing Market Map: Can AI help solve the nurse shortage?
This is part of Elion’s weekly market map series where we break down critical vendor categories and the key players in them. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.
An outflow of nurses from the workforce in recent years—almost 100,000 retired during the pandemic—has left hospitals battling a constant staffing problem. The exodus created a care gap, stretching those that stayed across more and more patients. To address this challenge, hospitals have gotten more innovative around tooling dedicated to empowering nurses and extending their impacts.
The Use Case for the “Virtual Nurse”
Our virtual nursing category covers products that enable nurses to monitor patients remotely through privacy-aware cameras. Traditionally, nurses would need to physically move from room to room to assess patients and document their findings in the EHR. Virtual nursing systems change this dynamic, allowing nurses to perform check-ins from a centralized location either within the hospital or at an outsourced facility.
These systems let nurses respond to a wide range of patient requests, from minor needs like water to more serious medical concerns, without always needing to visit the room immediately. They also improve workflows like virtual sitting for patients that require in-room supervision at all times to ensure patient and hospital staff safety. Instead of having one nurse sit in the room watching one patient, they allow staff to watch multiple patients simultaneously, dramatically improving efficiency. For instance, Guthrie Clinic used the telesitting technology so their nurses could watch 14 patients at once—a lifestyle improvement that cut nurse turnover in half.
The Tech Behind the Screen
From a technology perspective, the cameras are relatively simple, but they need to operate seamlessly and securely on the hospital’s network, feeding camera data back to the virtual nursing platform. Both patients and staff have privacy concerns when it comes to 24/7 monitoring, so setups tend to have mechanisms to notify when they are recording, and will turn the camera away when they are off.
Virtual nursing solutions are also building offerings that enable health systems to become smart hospitals, using AI and computer vision to monitor for a variety of use cases like patient falls, staff safety, elopement risk, and handwashing. Once the devices are added into the room for primary use cases like virtual nursing and sitting, additional use cases become available.
Differentiating Between Vendors
It’s easy to put cameras into patient rooms and monitor them, but executing well proves more challenging. Considerations include:
Maintenance and reliability: Cameras and devices must be easy for hospital staff to deploy onto the network, requiring a minimum of maintenance and near-constant uptime
Cybersecurity: Security for camera feeds and the system overall is paramount to protect patient privacy as well as the safety of patients and hospital staff.
Accuracy: Building AI-enabled workflows like ones that can detect when a patient has fallen, or when a staff member isn’t washing their hands appropriately, requires a high degree of precision and expertise in computer vision.
Staffing: Some virtual nursing solutions also provide clinical staffing themselves to help reduce the burden on hospital nurses.
Some of the vendors that we’ve seen operating in this space include Avasure, Artisight, Banyan, Care.ai, Caregility, Enghouse Video, HelloCare, Hicuity Health, LookDeep, and ThinkAndor.
It’s clear that these solutions can help extend a workforce that’s already overburdened and potentially reduce the pressure on the nurses themselves. However, how AI will be deployed with video monitoring devices and how patients and staff will respond to them is an open question. While some use cases like falls detection seem worth the tradeoffs, we’re curious to see how staff and patients respond as these workflows advance and become more clinical in nature.