Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1111624
Linda Burnes Bolton RN, DrPH, FAAN Sr. VP for Nursing and CNO Cedars-Sinai We're still waiting for nursing schools to provide more of the skills nurses need outside of the acute care setting. We need to provide pathways for nurses to be able to earn an income outside the walls of the hospital. There's an old story about a fisherperson pulling bodies out of the river. Someone on the bank says, "Why don't you go see who's throwing them in?" That's what nursing should be doing more of: going upriver to keep people healthy and not just pulling the bodies out when people are drowning. We must directly engage with consumers where they live, work, play and go to school in order to create healthier communities. I'd like to see more quali- fied family health centers whose leadership is at least 50 percent actual residents of the community. For exam- ple, Drexell University has a program where nurses work in a community health center within a neighborhood. It's all nurse-led and their outcomes are phenomenal: decreases in ED visits, more students stay- ing in school and graduating, improved health outcomes and more. Deborah McCoy RN, M.S., FACHE Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer Methodist Hospital of Southern California Interoperability remains a problem. We often run into situations where the hospital has Allscripts, another organi- zation uses Epic and a doctor's office has something we've never heard of. One doesn't always talk to the other. We have to develop sys- tems that allow data to be transferred from one reposi- tory to another and figure out what data we want to share. It needs to include all the information providers want, such as when we send the summary of a patient's hospi- tal stay and post-discharge instructions to their physi- cian's office, in a format the providers can use. Suzie Reinsvold RN, MSN Chief Nursing Officer and Chief Operating Officer Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital Electronic health records and documenting care are areas where we still have room to improve. Too often, EHRs are not designed to clearly and simply tell the story of what is going on with the patient. Clinicians have had to modify their workflow to focus on the EHR rather than the patient. I look forward to EHRs that are more patient-care-centric and provider-friendly. Voice recognition and greater inte- gration with bedside and physiological monitoring might help with that. I also look forward to a world with improved interoperability where patients have more ownership of their health records. Another very exciting area is virtual reality, which will be able to augment clinical site training for nursing students. With the need to educate providers not just on skills, but also on critical thinking, I look forward to seeing wider use of that technology in the future. Q & A STILL WAITING Are there any healthcare developments that you expected to have come about by now that still haven't? 30 Working Nurse l WorkingNurse.com Celebrating National Nurses Week April 29–June 10, 2019 Linda Burnes Bolton