Abstract

In healthcare, nurses are the linchpin connecting medical expertise with compassionate caregiving. However, excessive time spent on non-clinical duties impedes their ability to provide optimal patient care. Nightingale is an AI-powered digital platform designed to revolutionize nursing care. The platform enhances care delivery with various features like AI-powered nursing care plan generation, AI-generated knowledge base, automatic consultation notifications for doctors and optimization of the discharge process. Noteworthy outcomes include estimated monthly savings of 1000 nursing hours, reduced discharge times, improved patient satisfaction, and efficient resource utilization. Nightingale and low-cost development, utilizing in-house IT expertise and Generative AI, showcases a cost-effective and transformative solution for enhancing nursing excellence, patient outcomes, and overall healthcare delivery.

Introduction

Nurses are pivotal in delivering comprehensive and quality patient care in hospitals. An excessive investment of time in non-clinical duties is a challenge faced by all nurses. The results of a time-motion study conducted within our healthcare institution revealed that nurses spend only 31.9% of their working hours engaged in direct patient care. This alarming statistic underscores the urgency to address the root causes to ensure that nurses can dedicate a more significant proportion of their time to patient care activities.

They developed an AI-powered digital platform to address these challenges to enhance care quality, improve interdisciplinary collaboration, and establish a robust foundation for informed decision-making. Through this initiative, we strive to empower nursing professionals, elevate patient outcomes, and drive advancements in healthcare delivery.

Details of Solution

We introduced a transformative AI-powered digital platform that redefines the landscape of patient care, collaboration, and knowledge dissemination.

• Nursing care plan generation: Our platform harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to revolutionize the process of nursing care plan creation. Based on the clinical assessment, the AI engine generates personalized care plans that align with the unique needs of each patient. The nursing staff then validates AI-generated plans before being utilized for patient care.
• Nursing knowledge base: Access to up-to-date medical information is integral to effective nursing practice. Our platform offers an extensive nursing knowledge base, which serves as a ready-reckoner for nurses to gain information such as steps for preparing a patient for a specific procedure or precautions to be taken when administering a medicine. The knowledge base features content generated using the AI system, which senior nurses then validate.
• Automatic consultation notification for doctors: Our platform automatically notifies physicians of new consultation requests utilizing WhatsApp notifications and voice calls, which utilize text-to-speech technology.
• Patient status tracker for communication with bystanders: Ensuring transparent communication with bystanders, our system facilitates periodic patient status updates from the labour room, mitigating anxiety and enhancing patient family engagement.
• Discharge status tracker: The discharge tracker dashboard provides a birds-eye view of the discharge processes within the ward. It features intelligent functionality like identifying delays in the discharge process and highlighting patients from faraway places and those with insurance so that these discharges can be prioritized.
• Learning Portal: Continuous learning is crucial for nursing professionals to stay updated with evolving medical knowledge. Our platform features a dedicated learning portal that offers courses, resources, and opportunities for skill enhancement.
• Collaboration: Collaboration among nursing staff is essential for a cohesive care environment. An event calendar informs everyone about training sessions, workshops, and other hospital activities.
• Credentialing and Privileging: Our solution simplifies the credentialing and privileging process for nursing staff. Nurses can track their credentials and privileges through the platform, ensuring compliance with hospital and regulatory requirements.
• Staff Assistance: Empowering nurses to escalate critical matters is essential for timely issue resolution. Nurses can raise a request using the platform routed to the supervisor whenever they require assistance. An AI-powered resolution checklist is automatically made available to the supervisor.
• Nursing Management Information System: A robust nursing management information system offers real-time insights into nursing activities, aiding administrators in optimizing resource allocation and workforce management.

Outcomes Achieved

• Estimated savings of 1000 nursing hours per month.
• The automatic consultation notification ensures timely consultations with minimal follow-up.
• The system can facilitate the rapid generation of care plans and knowledge articles.
• The status tracker in the labour room has helped us achieve improved patient satisfaction and improved nurse-bystander communication.
• The ward-level discharge tracker dashboard and other improvements have helped reduce the average discharge time for cash patients from 3.5 hours to 1.5 hours.
• Significant time savings by replacing the manual paper-based system for credentialing and privileging.
• The escalation system ensures timely help to assist nurses in handling incidents.
• The management information system helps the nurse leaders gain better visibility into the real-time deployment status of the large nursing workforce across 40+ locations, thereby facilitating data-driven decision-making.

Cost Effectiveness

Nightingale’s cost-effectiveness is a result of smart technological choices and innovative strategies. Utilizing the expertise of our in-house IT team, the platform was crafted as a low-cost incremental innovation. Cloud technology played a vital role, minimizing capital expenditure while ensuring scalability. Generative AI was utilized to facilitate cost-effective content generation.

Conclusion

Nightingale, our innovative AI-powered digital platform, represents a transformative leap in healthcare delivery. Nightingale enables nurses to focus on what they do best – providing compassionate, high-quality patient care. The

platform’s AI-powered systems and streamlined communication mechanisms have saved valuable nursing hours and significantly improved patient satisfaction. Nightingale’s success underscores the synergy between human expertise and artificial intelligence, demonstrating the potential of technology to enhance healthcare outcomes. It serves as a testament to the power of innovation in addressing critical challenges in healthcare delivery, paving the way for a future where technology empowers healthcare professionals, enriches patient experiences, and, ultimately, saves lives.