Nursing & Healthcare News
Are Nurses Now Tech Support?
Patient education includes navigating and troubleshooting digital technology
In an increasingly automated healthcare system, patients often look to nurses to explain what it all means.
Digital Educators
Healthcare is becoming more and more digital. Patients now schedule appointments through apps, receive test results through portals, monitor blood pressure and glucose with connected devices, consult clinicians through telehealth, and encounter artificial intelligence at almost every stage of their care.
Who helps patients make sense of that array of technology? Increasingly, it’s nurses, whether we’re prepared or not.
Theodore Fletcher, RN, MSN, PHN, ACRN, CCM, an ANA\C Advocacy Institute fellow in AI integration guidance says that while nurses are skilled educators, “those clinical competencies don’t automatically translate into technical expertise.”
Learning Curves
Emerging healthcare technologies often have a steep learning curve for both patients and nurses. Questions nurses are now having to tackle include:
- What does that alert on my glucose monitor mean?
- Why does my patient portal say something different from what my doctor told me? • Should I send a photo of this rash through the app or make an appointment?
- What happens to the health information collected by my wearable device?
Answering these questions can be a formidable challenge, especially with patients who are older, have disabilities, or speak limited English. Digital literacy varies greatly from patient to patient.
Helping patients navigate digital healthcare tools sometimes also involves skills that aren’t taught in nursing school.
For example, a telehealth nurse might need to troubleshoot device compatibility and network problems as well as perform clinical assessments.
AI tools may also require nurses to teach patients to recognize when the tool can be trusted and when it can’t. AI chatbots sometimes produce plausible, convincing answers that are completely wrong and potentially dangerous.
Organizational Support
Are nurses getting the training they need to tackle these challenges? “Not consistently,” says Fletcher.
“Training needs to extend beyond simply teaching nurses how to use a technology to also include its limitations, appropriate use, privacy and safety considerations, and clear pathways for escalating an issue.”
Another problem is that nurses don’t always have the time they need to educate patients and work through technical hurdles. “Troubleshooting technology can quickly consume time that was never built into the workflow,” Fletcher says.
Nurses have always played a vital role in educating patients. The ability to confidently extend that role into the digital space could become one of the most important nursing skills of the next decade.
Still, Fletcher sees a danger in making nurses “the default technical support for every digital tool introduced into care.” He says that responsibility needs to be recognized in staffing, workforce design, and patient assignments, rather than simply being added to the nurse’s existing workload.
LUCY FIGUEROA, RN, DNP, is a California-based nurse with experience in acute care and healthcare policy. She writes about the evolving challenges facing today’s nurses.
In this Article: Healthcare Technology
