Telenursing is the future

In 1997 the American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing published AAACN Telehealth Standards to direct nursing practice in this developing area of nursing. Since then, telenursing has been gaining momentum as indicated by the fact that the American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing spotlighted a telehealth track at its annual conference in April. Featured telenursing topics at its 2011 conference in San Antonio included telephone triage outcomes, legal issues in telenursing and managing outbound calling programs.

Loretta Schlacta-Fairchild, Ph.D., RN, is the founder and President of iTelehealth Inc. She sees “the practice of telenursing as the catalyst that can completely reframe our profession and take nursing into the 21st century.” Viewing telenursing as an emerging role in today’s health care world, she cites the following benefits of this new technology:

• reduces costs;
• reaches populations in rural, mostly underserved areas;
• reduces transportation time and cost for patients and providers;
• provides patients better access to care; and
• improves productivity in the home health care field.

Telenursing is now utilized in telephone call centers and in treating the chronically ill at home through the use of TeleCare devices.

Telephone call centers

Telephone call centers, formerly labeled telephone triage centers, such as “Ask-A-Nurse,” only partially describe the scope of telehealth nursing. Today telenursing involves assessing, evaluating an individualized plan of care and communicating that care plan to the patient within a 10-minute time frame over the phone. Making use of protocols and guidelines, telehealth nurses prioritize, develop care plans, educate and evaluate outcomes. Today, nurses face more well-informed patients with high expectations. Due to the rapidly growing Internet information library, patients expect instantaneous diagnoses and treatment options. This fact alone requires telehealth nurses to be able to efficiently utilize critical thinking, in addition to possessing very strong clinical assessment skills as well as communication abilities.

TeleCare devices for chronically ill patients

Minority Nurse magazine describes how the Visiting Nurse Association of Ohio uses TeleCare devices to monitor a variety of patient data for the chronically ill population it serves. Patients are given a small home monitoring device no larger than an alarm clock and, through this instrument, their vital signs, blood sugar, weight and oxygen saturation level can be electronically sent through a telephone jack back to the nurse. These electronic devices enable nurses to serve more patients more efficiently, as well as improve the abilities of patients to monitor the process of their own disease. Current ongoing research at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland State University looks at the effectiveness of these devices with regard to lower hospital admission rates.

To keep up with current practice, many nursing programs now include heavy emphasis on computerized tools for learning, and in hospitals there is increased use of mobile phone devices for communicating between patient and nurse, as well as for nurse-to-nurse communication. Telenursing is here to stay, although it will never replace a nurse.

Written by the University of Phoenix Writer Network.