Nurse-physician bedside rounding has been around since the 1800s in the United States. Although the practice has evolved across centuries, its goal has always been to serve as a collaborative activity for the patient’s ultimate benefit. Initially requiring extensive physical paperwork, in recent years, we’ve seen rounding evolve to a digital practice in many instances.
The benefits remain, but the digital rounding process is more streamlined and efficient, helping staff triage both service recovery issues and medical concerns, while enabling the collection of data for analysis and reporting.
Digital rounding benefits and best practices
If your organization is thinking about implementing a digital rounding solution, it is important to consider your pain points to determine if the benefits of digital rounding can help address those issues. Whether you’re looking to enhance data collection or streamline paperwork management in an effective and efficient manner, a digital rounding tool might be the best solution for your problem.
Implementing a new technology solution is no easy task, especially during a global pandemic. While there is no secret sauce, demonstrating to your staff that digital rounding will add value and decrease friction is key to successful implementation.
There are a number of best practices for implementing digital rounding:
- Setting clear targets for performance improvement with stakeholders
- Identifying champions to lead each initiative who have vested interest and the power to affect change
- Ensure procedures are in place that support your initiatives
By focusing on putting the patient first and ensuring everyone involved has the same end goal in mind, an organization-wide digital rounding implementation can have a positive impact on patients and staff while still retaining a personal touch.
Solving for X with digital rounding
Traditional nurse-physician rounding is still most common when discussing the practice of hospital rounding, but it’s important to consider that flexible digital rounding tools can be used in any number of ways that benefit staff and patients alike. These include:
- Rounding
- Checklists
- Surveys
- Audits
- Reporting
- Recording
- Notes
- Trends
- Benchmarks
Take employee experience rounding, for example. For healthcare organizations looking to assess the engagement of staff with their work, as well as to get a sense for what they’re feeling and why they feel that way, employee experience rounding initiated through a digital rounding tool may be a good solution.
The survey functionality of digital rounding is also implemented in a very real way with The DAISY Award For Extraordinary Nurses (The DAISY Award), powered by GetWellNetwork’s GetWell Rounds+ tool. The Daisy Award recognizes and honors the superhuman work nurses do for patients and families every day, in care settings both domestically and internationally, including VA hospitals.
A digital modality for rounding also enables surveys — of any kind — to be accessed in a variety of formats, including via QR code, email hyperlinks, portal hyperlinks, or online. Offering self-survey flexibility for end users is one way to meet those being surveyed where they are.
In practice: positive change for our Veterans
GetWell Rounds+ is the industry’s ”Best in KLAS” digital patient rounding, reporting, and real-time service recovery solution. With unlimited use cases, it streamlines data collection, reduces documentation time, and helps collect intelligence on trends and benchmarks.
Recently, one of GetWellNetwork’s client partners implemented GetWell Rounds+. Their chief focuses included:
- COVID-19 screening
- WECARE rounding
- Several quality and safety initiatives
Led by nursing leadership and the Veteran Experience Office, this facility took a multidisciplinary approach to implementing the solution. Using iPads and predefined standardized surveys, they started collecting data. Nursing focused on nurse leader rounding, catheter-associated infection prevention, and fall prevention while leadership focused on WECARE patient and staff rounding.
The result? In just the first few months, more than 1,300 surveys were completed, providing invaluable feedback and data to affect positive change in the facility. It’s a great start, but the work is far from done.
The bottom line
Digital rounding can help streamline staff processes while enabling quality improvement systemwide at a healthcare organization. By bringing the age-old practice of nurse and physician rounding into the digital age, tools like GetWell Rounds+ help facilitate better patient care for all.
Whether your rounding needs are organizationwide or on a hospital-by-hospital basis, it’s important to seek solutions that can help personalize the experience for patients and staff alike. Equally important is consistent innovation as digital healthcare technology evolves.
Regardless of whether you are looking for a way to more effectively capture the rounding process, streamline your checklist or survey documentation, document relevant data for trends assessment and benchmarking, or something that does some or all of this, a digital rounding solution can meet your needs.
About the Author
Karl A. Morneau, VP, Value Management Lead, serves as the leader of GetWellNetwork’s government service strategy across the country, applying patient engagement technology solutions in the delivery of family-centered care to improve clinical and patient outcomes. Previously, he served as the Director of Client Service overseeing operations and professional services in the Veterans Health Agency and Defense Health Agency Healthcare organizations for more than six years. Karl retired from the United States Army in 2012 after 21 years of service.
