Ardent Health Services deploys care.ai's Virtual Nursing platform

Ardent’s Lovelace Medical Center will be the first to implement the AI-powered nursing platform

Care.ai is an AI-powered ambient monitoring platform for healthcare facilities: the company's Smart Care Facility Platform transforms healthcare settings into responsive care facilities that continuously monitor patient activity and the surrounding clinical and operational workflows. 

Depending on their care setting and needs, healthcare organizations can use the platform to improve operations such as infection prevention and control, patient and protocol monitoring, workforce optimization, virtual care, and virtual nursing.

It's that last solution that interested Ardent Health Services, which is why earlier this week the two companies announced a partnership to implement care.ai’s Virtual Nursing solution at Lovelace Medical Center, Ardent’s Albuquerque, New Mexico-based affiliate.

Ardent, which operates 30 hospitals and nearly 200 sites of care across six states, is among the first of care.ai’s partners to introduce AI-powered nursing.

"Ardent and care.ai share the common goal to transform traditional how care is delivered to optimize quality and safety outcomes while addressing the most pressing industry challenges in new ways. We are specifically aligned on leveraging technology in new ways to tackle the critical nursing shortage and fiscally unsustainable models of care," Chakri Toleti, founder and CEO of care.ai, told VatorNews.

"With our AI-powered smart care facility platform, virtual nurses can manage patient care and administrative tasks that don’t require physical proximity. This means bedside nurses can focus their time and attention on the most important elements of human care delivery."

By starting with care.ai's Virtual Nursing solution, a Lovelace nurse will virtually appear on screen through the television in a patient’s room and provide assistance with a variety of administrative and clinical tasks such as admission, routine monitoring, rounding, discharge, and other clinical and operational workflows. This will support Ardent’s bedside nurses to focus their time on what they were trained to do: deliver hands-on care to patients. The idea is to ultimately increase staff retention, improve patient satisfaction, and reduce operating costs.

Additionally, care.ai's Virtual Nursing solution expands the pool of nursing staff available to Lovelace Medical Center by unlocking new career paths for experienced nurses who may have physical limitations or prefer a different work environment, Toleti explained.

"For example, John Donga, a Lovelace Medical Center RN, suffered an injury that sidelined him from working on-the-floor. But through Lovelace’s virtual nursing program, John’s career has been revived, enabling him to continue to care for his patients and empower his bedside colleagues, extending the profession he loves," he said.

While the Lovelace Medical Center will be the first to implement the solution, there are already plans to bring it to other Ardent-affiliated facilities, with the expectation of deploying the full platform more broadly across Ardent's entire system.

Founded in 2018, the Orlando, Florida-based care.ai transforms healthcare settings into responsive care facilities that continuously monitor patient activity and the surrounding clinical and operational workflows. Using AI-enabled edge sensors, the platform surfaces real-time inferences and insights to alert and report on activities that help healthcare organizations improve patient outcomes.

While care.ai's technology doesn’t monitor patient vitals directly, it does have the ability to integrate with vital monitoring solutions to help better support care teams. It also automates manual tasks, empowering care teams to spend more time with patients and improve overall quality of care. Additionally, it automatically monitors patient rooms for potential risks to provide an added level of patient safety support.

By implementing the solution, Ardent will be able to measure improved quality, safety and compliance while optimizing labor, and specific outcome measures include minimizing premium agency spend, bed utilization optimization, improved caregiver, and patient satisfaction.

"Our solution includes powerful reporting and analytics tools that provide Ardent with new insights from granular-level data on session parameters, protocol adherence and care team efficacy," said Toleti.

"Healthcare facilities can use our solution to review the number of virtual nursing sessions held, session duration and tasks completed. This data can also be integrated with EMR, and used for regulatory compliance, reimbursement support and administrative planning."

This news comes just a few weeks after care.ai raised a $27 million round of funding.

(Image source: care.ai)