Portneuf Medical Center implements virtual nursing program

Patient room with virtual nurse on wall-mounted screen

Program will support bedside nurses and improve patient care and experience  

Pocatello, ID – Portneuf Medical Center today announced it has partnered with care.ai to implement virtual nursing and care.ai’s AI-powered ambient monitoring platform.

The virtual nursing solution is designed to help care teams work more efficiently and drive improved clinical outcomes. Enabled by AI-powered inferencing and in-room sensors, the platform allows nurses to manage a wide variety of patient care tasks that do not require physical proximity – from documentation to education, admission and discharge, update medication history to ensure quality care, conference in family members and address patient or family member questions or concerns. This enables on-site nurses to focus more time and attention on the crucial hands-on care that only they can provide. Together, remote and on-site care teams can manage admission, rounding, discharge and other clinical and operational tasks, which leads to high quality care, patient satisfaction and greater staff retention.

Portneuf’s integration of care.ai’s innovative platform comes at a critical time for health systems, as many face workforce shortages across all levels of care. The integration of care.ai’s Virtual Nursing solution will not only help address these shortages, but also improve the way healthcare is delivered at Portneuf for both patients and caregivers.

“At Portneuf, we are deeply committed to supporting caregivers and helping our teams improve the quality of care we provide. Now more than ever, retaining passionate, highly skilled caregivers and improving the work environment for frontline team members is critical to the success of any hospital,” said Jordan Herget, CEO of Portneuf Medical Center. “By integrating this AI-powered technology into our care delivery model, we will relieve some of the administrative burden carried by nurses and ensure our team members are able to continue providing the best care for patients while also taking care of themselves.”

The introduction of care.ai’s virtual nursing solution at Portneuf will offer nurses more flexibility and expand the pool of nursing staff available. The program also opens up new career paths for experienced nurses who may have physical limitations or prefer a different work environment.

care.ai’s virtual nursing solution will first be integrated into Portneuf Medical Center’s Medical-Surgical unit in July.