In today’s constantly evolving health care industry, proper and accurate clinical documentation is more important than ever. Nurses, in particular, are responsible for a bulk of patient care and record-keeping.
Atrium Health realized this, and recently, the organization embarked on a three-year clinical documentation optimization project to improve the workflow of nurses. In this episode of The Cerner Podcast, we’re joined by Becky Fox, chief nursing information officer and assistant vice president at Atrium Health. She discusses how her organization leveraged data and analytics during the optimization process and what training for nursing and clinical staff looked like.
Becky answers the following questions:
- Tell us about why Atrium Health chose to pursue this clinical documentation optimization project. What needs were identified within the organization, and what were the goals?
- Discuss some of the main areas of optimization this project focused on. What were some of the challenges you encountered along the way, and what can other health care leadership from these examples?
- Can you discuss the involvement and impact of clinical decisions support in this project?
- Within this clinical documentation optimization project, Atrium Health needed to train more than 8,000 nurses, nursing assistants, and other clinical staff across 12 acute care facilities. Typically, training would have been held in a four- to eight-hour in-person, classroom-style session – but Atrium Health didn’t go that route. Can you detail how you went about training your staff? What were the factors that contributed to that training decision?
- What were the results of this training? What was the response from the nursing and clinical staff, and what do you feel like other organizations might learn from this example?
- Broadly speaking, how has clinical documentation optimization benefited Atrium Health as a whole, and what’s next for your organization?
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