Preparing the Clinical Workforce for Connected Care

Caregility

Across healthcare, we are seeing a meaningful shift in how care teams are organized, supported, and connected. Virtual nursing, remote observation, centralized monitoring, digital patient engagement, and AI-assisted workflows are no longer distant concepts. These connected care strategies have arrived and have created a shift in the paradigm of care delivery.

That is an encouraging evolution. But as a nurse, I would offer one important caution: connected care transformation is not primarily a technology project.

Technology enables the work, but people determine whether it succeeds.

Organizations seeing the most meaningful progress are not simply installing cameras, devices, or dashboards. They’re taking the time to prepare their teams, redesign workflows, define roles, engage frontline staff, and build the trust required for new models of care to take hold. In many ways, the preparation is more important than the technical

implementation.

April Saathoff, DNP, RN, NI-BC, CPHIMS, Vice President and Chief Nursing Information Officer at Johns Hopkins Health System, who rolled out a Virtual Nursing program of 202 beds on 7 units across 4 hospitals, captured the gravity of upfront preparation at the recent ATA Nexus event:

“Successful virtual nursing begins well before go-live. While technology installation and solution design are important, critical work lies in bringing multidisciplinary teams together to co-design workflows that are practical and aligned with existing clinical practice. Engaging staff early ensures that key considerations are not overlooked and fosters a deeper understanding of how the model supports their work. As a result, adoption shifts from an exclusive focus on change management to shared ownership of care. These early discussions about the future state create a strong foundation for the project, guiding decisions and enabling a thoughtful design that ultimately improves patient outcomes.”

April’s perspective is a key factor in her health system’s success, with the program saving over 3,000 hours for bedside nurses and showing improved throughput metrics, decreased contract and premium pay expenses, and enhanced quality metrics in its first year of operation.

Staff engagement is where readiness begins

When health systems begin planning for virtual nursing, the natural tendency is to focus first on the technical questions: What devices will go in the room? How will the platform integrate with the EHR? Where will the virtual team sit? How will calls be routed?

Those are all important questions. But they are not the first questions I would ask.

I would start with: What work are we trying to redesign? What burden are we trying to relieve? What does the bedside team need most? How will patients and families experience this model? How will we know whether it is working?

Virtual nursing introduces new ways for bedside and remote team members to collaborate. That requires clarity. Bedside nurses need to understand what the virtual nurse will do, what remains at the bedside, how handoffs will happen, how escalation will work, and how the model will help rather than interrupt their day. Virtual nurses need defined competencies, clear workflows, and a shared understanding of how they support care continuity, quality, education, admissions, documentation, and more.

That means involving bedside nurses, virtual nurses, nurse leaders, educators, informaticists, physicians, ancillary teams, IT, quality, patient experience, and even patients and families in the design process. Staff concerns should be addressed early. Workflow gaps should be surfaced before go-live. Training should include not only how to use the technology, but how to communicate and collaborate across care spaces, and how to preserve the human connection that sits at the heart of nursing.

I often remind teams that adoption is emotional before it is operational. Nurses need to trust the model. That trust is built through preparation.

Readiness must include measurement

Preparedness also means knowing what success looks like before the program begins.

Virtual care leaders should identify the metrics that matter most to their organization, capture baseline data, and train teams on how their work contributes to measurable impact. That may include admission and discharge cycle times, documentation burden, patient education completion, interpreter use, fall rates, pressure injury prevention, HCAHPS domains, staff satisfaction, nurse vacancy, agency spend, or time returned to bedside teams.

This measurement mindset is especially important for nursing. Too often, nursing work is deeply valuable but inconsistently quantified. Virtual nursing gives us an opportunity to better capture the impact of nurse-led interventions, not only in terms of efficiency, but in quality, safety, experience, and workforce sustainability.

The next generation needs exposure before practicet need lab tests first

There is growing interest in enhancing workforce preparedness for digital health before clinicians are hired as well.

As connected care becomes embedded in clinical practice, nursing and medical education are evolving as well to give students earlier exposure to the tools, workflows, and care models they will encounter in modern healthcare environments.

Tomorrow’s clinicians will practice in settings where the hospital room may include digital whiteboards, smart TVs, in-room cameras, voice-activated workflows, virtual interpreters, remote family engagement, ambient documentation support, and AI-assists. They will need to know how to use these tools safely and ethically. But just as importantly, they will need to know how to communicate through them, evaluate the information they generate, protect patient privacy, recognize bias or limitations in AI-supported workflows, and maintain clinical judgment in a digitally enabled environment.

This is why digital health education belongs in nursing and medical programs, not as an elective novelty, but as a practical component of clinical readiness. Nursing schools are increasingly incorporating virtual care scenarios and communication training into simulation labs to build AI literacy, remote assessment skills, and data-informed escalation protocols.

Preparing people is the path to sustainable transformation

Connected care offers tremendous promise. It can extend scarce resources, improve patient and family communication, support safer workflows, reduce burden on bedside teams through more flexible models of care.

But sustainable transformation will not come from technology alone.

It will come from the thoughtful preparation of the people using it. It will come from engaging clinicians early, designing workflows around real operational needs, training teams with intention, measuring impact, and preparing the next generation of healthcare professionals for a more connected clinical environment.

The future of care will be digital, but it must remain deeply human. Our responsibility as healthcare leaders is to prepare the workforce for both.

Free Resource: Virtual Care Change Management Readiness Checklist