MUSC Builds on Success to Expand Virtual Nursing Across the Hospital
By Eric Wicklund
It’s an “exciting time for nursing transformation,” says Emily Warr, Administrator for the Center of Telehealth at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). And that means it’s time for the health system to scale its Virtual Nursing program beyond their med/surg units.
“We have grown significantly, are planning to pilot in room equipment this quarter, and are making great progress with quality and finance metric improvements,” says Warr, a participant in the HealthLeaders Virtual Nursing Mastermind program.
MUSC, which has taken part in the Mastermind program the past two years, is seeing growth at a time when many health systems and hospitals are ramping up their virtual nursing programs to meet a rising demand for effective care transformation. Many are looking to move beyond the initial ROI of improving nurse workflows and well-being and are looking for clear clinical value, such as improved patient outcomes or administrative metrics such as patient length of stay or admission/discharge times.
In a May 2024 HealthLeaders interview, Warr said MUSC had launched an earlier version of virtual nursing that didn’t succeed because it wasn’t sustainable. That led to a second iteration, which focused on specific pain points and targeted tasks in which success could be measured and proven.
Fast-forward to today, and Warr says they’ll soon be expanding the program beyond med/surg to the Emergency Department, ICU and other specialty care units.
“We can’t expand fast enough,” she says. “Nursing units across the system are demanding the service and are eager to see the benefits in their work area. I think the specialty units will be interesting to explore and will present scalability challenges, but we look forward to problem-solving those while maintaining a focus on outcomes and efficiency.”
MUSC’s program tracks several metrics, beginning with nursing satisfaction and turnover rates and patient satisfaction scores, all of which have improved with the program. They’re also charting pressure injuries and hospital-acquired infections, time to discharge, quality of information given to patients upon discharge, quality of patient-nurse communications and even time given back to nurses.
The health system is reporting a 10% reduction in nurse time spent in the EMR, a 5% improvement if patient experience tied to communication with nurses at admission, and a 10% improvement in patient throughput, or timeliness to discharge.
Perhaps the only drawback at the moment to expansion, Warr says, is a hiring pause on virtual nurses, which she says is necessary for MUSC to catch up on workflow efficiencies and investigate productivity.
And that’s where Warr is focusing her excitement. The expansion of virtual nursing to other departments not only poses new challenges, but opens up the model to new ideas for care management and new outcomes for improvement. That the program has worked so well in med/surg doesn’t mean it will thrive in other environments, but MUSC has the experience and the data to build off of those early gains.
That includes, eventually, new care pathways that extend outside the hospital, even into the home.
“We have virtual nursing roles in all areas of our virtual ecosystem,” she points out.
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation at HealthLeaders.