Dedicated Nursing Services Aim to Address Shortages, Support Bedside Care Teams
Hicuity Health, the nation’s leading provider of high-acuity telemedicine services, announced the expansion of its virtual nursing telemedicine services. The expanded range of care services builds on the company’s 16 years of virtual nursing experience in the delivery of telemedicine care.
Hicuity’s announcement of the virtual nursing services addresses key healthcare industry staffing trends and responds to interest voiced by a range of facilities, including current Hicuity partners. The services assign to virtual nurses various nursing tasks which do not require hands-on interaction with patients and are typically time-consuming. This enables the bedside staff to fully focus on patient care and deliver improved clinical outcomes. The nursing tasks that can be done by a virtual nurse are numerous; examples include admission and discharge documentation, patient and family education, medication reconciliation, patient monitoring, assisting bedside nursing preceptors, additional documentation, and other responsibilities. The Hicuity service is not a one-size-fits-all offering but, rather, offers task and workflow flexibility at the unit, hospital, or system level.
“Hicuity Health Virtual Nursing services enable a hospital to add nursing capacity quickly and flexibly. This can provide much needed support for the bedside nursing team which, in turn, can reduce the recruitment burden for the hospital and potentially the need to relocate nurses,” said Marcia Murphy, Vice President of Clinical Operations and Nursing for Hicuity Health. “The impact of engaging virtual nursing care is multi-dimensional. Most importantly, it allows the bedside nursing team to focus on delivering high quality, hands-on patient care. Virtual nursing provides real-time support for the bedside team, which can help reduce nursing errors, stress and burnout. In doing so, it can materially improve the hospital’s clinical care, increase staffing flexibility, and reduce hospital costs by improving both the nurse and the patient experience.”
According to the 2021 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report more than 1/3 of hospitals surveyed in early 2021 reported an RN vacancy rate above 10%. The issue intensified with the clinical challenges and staffing trends of the second half of 2021, exacerbating nursing shortages and increasing clinical costs. The use of virtual nursing ensures that the clinical work that needs to be done gets done, while bedside nurses maintain a priority focus on those nursing elements that can only be performed in person. The objective is not simply to relocate the workload but, by doing so, improve patient care, staff support, and clinical outcomes.
“Throughout the history of Hicuity Health, nursing has been core to the care we provide, whether a client relies on us for tele-ICU, telemetry, or remote monitoring,” highlighted Lou Silverman, CEO of Hicuity Health. “Defining a specific virtual nursing service allows us to leverage our deep telemedicine delivery expertise and extend our talented nursing staff to support hospitals and other health facilities that are increasingly challenged to adequately staff their nursing functions. Our goal is to collaborate with the hospital care team to improve patient care and better support their nursing team.”
Hicuity Health is currently contracted to serve more than 115 hospitals in 30 states. Hicuity Health’s team of U.S. board-certified providers and other clinicians conducts 1.2 million patient interactions annually while caring for 120,000 patients. 
