CommonSpirit Health at Home

Focusing on partnerships, technology and caring for our dedicated nurses.

At CommonSpirit Health at Home, our nursing focus over the past year was centered on caring for those who are caring for our patients. Understanding that the nursing workforce is tired and stressed due to the pandemic, we made it our priority to alleviate this in tangible ways where they would feel the difference. As a result, the gift of time, reducing their stress, and providing a work-life balance became our top priority.

After hours/on-call responsibilities are one of the greatest contributors to the burnout of our clinicians. Nurses have always rotated on-call assignments to support our patients’ after-hours needs, but this practice negatively impacts a nurse’s ability to maintain a work-life balance and increases stress levels that are already heightened by the pandemic. CommonSpirit Health at Home implemented two solutions to address on-call needs:

The first was inclusion of telehealth/ virtual visit capabilities, providing our nurses the visual component to phone triage. This supported the nurse’s ability to address the patient’s needs without having to complete an in-home visit. Telehealth virtual visits also supported nurses with managing daily schedules, allowing nurses to pre-plan telehealth visits on the patient’s plan of care.

Our second innovative approach included partnership with IntellaTriage, a clinically led on-call triage center to relieve our nurses of the after-hours on-call burden. This has made a huge impact in the work life balance of our already stretched RN workforce. As this rolls out across the Division, it is unburdening our nurses from

“Nurses are the new era of superheroes. In every sense of the word they symbolize hope and have the power to impact the lives of others through their courage, compassion, advocacy and resilience.”

— Karen Snavely, RDCS HeartLand Region

Noteworthy Numbers

1,600

Nurses

70,245

Patients Served

51

Home Health Locations

6

Infusion Locations

Kim Kindred, RN, BSN, served as the Division Vice PresidentClinical Services for CommonSpirit Health at Home through April 2022. She’s now serving as the CommonSpirit System VP of Patient Experience-Care Continuum. Many thanks, Kim, for your years of service with Health at Home! We’re thrilled to know that you’re still doing great things as part of our CommonSpirit national nursing team.

after hours responsibilities, giving back the gift of time and work-life balance. As an added bonus, this change in job responsibilities has been a recruiting differentiator. The elimination of on-call coverage by the nursing staff is bringing in more applicants to fill our nursing positions at a rate not seen in the past.

Recent nursing feedback also revealed duplication in our documentation processes. To address the issue, we created a dedicated work group to review, research and discover ways to reduce overall clicks and questions. This work group ultimately recommended a reduction of 29 questions/clicks and removed four category areas. The good news is that we made these changes without disrupting the documentation quality.

The newly streamlined documentation process was met with resounding approvals. Some of the comments we heard from our nurses were, “Thank you so much for making these changes” and “This saves so much time!”

As CommonSpirit Health at Home continues its focus on caring for those who care for our patients, we will look for innovative ways to create balance for our nurses while always elevating our ability to address patient needs with humankindness. •