As technology improves and advances, there are more and more resources becoming available in the field of healthcare. Some of these new technologies take tasks completely out of human hands, some are merely tools meant to be wielded, and some are meant to work alongside and augment our care team. Virtual nursing is one of the latter, a way for very few nurses to provide support ,and ensure better outcomes for nurses and patients alike.

What is Virtual Nursing?

The concept of Virtual Nursing is a bit confusing and oftentimes people make the leap to telehealth, and while somewhat related, for the most part they are entirely different. Telehealth is a wellness or consultation visit performed online through the use of a phone or computer. 

Virtual nursing is the process of using various tools like remote patient monitoring, ambient computer vision, in-room cameras and microphones to allow a nurse, who may or may not be stationed remotely, to monitor many patients and provide real time support to the direct care nurses. This “virtual nurse” is able to see their patients with cameras, check their vitals through monitors, and IS able to inform onsite direct care nurses of issues as they arise. Virtual nurses are able to take on the tasks of  admission, discharge and transfer documentation, medication reconciliation, hourly rounding, precepting on demand among other things.

What use is THE VALUE OF Virtual Nursing?

Currently it’s no big secret that the healthcare industry is experiencing historic rates of turnover. The recent pandemic and ongoing nurse shortage has led to some rather extreme burnout among nurses. With fewer nurses in each hospital, and a country wide nurse-to-patient ratio, badly skewed towards patients, it’s exceedingly important that we begin finding solutions that support the work of direct care nurses by offloading tasks and streamline workflows.

That’s where Virtual Nursing comes in, it’s meant to be a force multiplier of sorts for the direct care nurses. Instead of running back and forth trying to meet the different needs of all their patients, the virtual nurse can offload some of the work to assist the direct care nurse all in real time, while improving patient outcomes and experience as well as nurse satisfaction.

What is virtualnursing.com?

Virtualnursing.com is a free web resource meant to inform and educate interested parties about the potential of virtual nursing. Virtualnursing.com is a community for like minded people who believe in the future of Virtual Nursing as a tool for change. It’s meant to be a resource to help share resources and lessons learned on virtual nursing and as a place for like minded nurses and nurse leaders to brainstorm, share, and learn. Virtualnursing.com is for nurses and moderated by nurses, and is intended to become the place to find resources for virtual nursing, including ideas for staffing, use cases and organizational lessons learned while implementing virtual nursing as a care delivery model. Anyone can share their virtual nursing artifacts and tools with the community as well. Hopefully this will help nurses and nurse leaders around the country find answers to some of their virtual nursing questions, and allow them to share any lessons they’ve learned with others.