Help simplify nurses’ lives: 5 ways to streamline nursing workflows

• Nurses are impacted by haphazard workflow management, ineffective information sharing, and other communication challenges.  
• Hospitals have several opportunities to improve nursing communication, such as integrating fragmented systems, prioritizing critical alerts, and increasing workflow transparency.  
• Hospitals that strengthen their communication can reduce burnout, improve productivity, and promote better patient outcomes 

Long shifts, stressful work environments, and staffing challenges are common issues affecting more than 4.7 million registered nurses in the United States. To put this into perspective, the National Academy of Medicine found that 76% of nurses reported feelings of burnout in 2024.  

An aging population and a projected nursing shortage only worsen this crisis. To make meaningful progress, hospitals must ensure their care teams can share information effectively to provide quality care.  

With many factors affecting communication and collaboration in nursing, it ultimately comes down to clinical workflow management.  

Improving efficiency truly starts with small, actionable changes. Here are five opportunities to strengthen your nursing communication techniques and make their workdays easier.  

1. Drive alerts to the non-clinical departments for non-clinical patient requests 

Nurses are the glue that holds their care teams together; as a result, they often dedicate hours to tasks outside their clinical duties.  

Whether it’s changing a monitoring device battery or picking up patient meals, these extra responsibilities can lead to breakdowns in clinical workflow management that negatively impact productivity and patient experiences.  

A robust solution built for communication and collaboration in nursing can distribute alerts to non-clinical roles best suited to handle the situation. For example, a bed cleaning request can be sent directly to environmental services without interrupting nurses from doing what they do best: caring for patients. 

2. Escalate alerts to the correct on-call physician, even if you don’t know their name 

Effective communication in nursing is the name of the game, but it’s easier said than done.  

Care teams are becoming increasingly larger, spanning multiple departments and facilities. Yet, it’s crucial for everyone to communicate without delays.  

Save valuable time for your nurses by empowering them with a clinical communication platform that has an enterprise-wide, web-based directory at its core. That way, they don’t have to track down the right on-call physician, play phone tag, and wait for contact center operators.  

This single source of truth is consistently updated and serves as a central repository for contact preferences, which are necessary for escalation.  

In many cases, a physician may prefer to be texted on a smartphone, but if they don’t respond within a set amount of time, the system automatically escalates to their encrypted pager.  

Escalation can go beyond devices to roles as well—escalate to the next available caregiver or response team—to ensure patients get the care they need as quickly as possible.  
 

3. Connect disparate systems to keep information flowing 

Many communication tools in nursing are unproductive due to the siloed structures of their health systems. 

If we think of healthcare workflow management like the human circulatory system, information needs to be constantly available like oxygen. Nurses interact with dozens of clinical technologies, including computerized provider order entry (CPOE) applications.  

At most hospitals today, many of these systems are unable to exchange information. If they do, the impact is very limited, lacking significant value or context.  

To improve communication and collaboration in nursing, healthcare organizations can mobilize alerts from their EHR. One way is by using patient vital signs to calculate a Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS).  

If the MEWS exceeds your hospital’s determined thresholds, the system automatically routes an alert to the correct provider on their preferred mobile device. This kind of clinical workflow management provides the level of detail needed to act immediately. 

4. Prioritize urgent alerts while filtering out non-urgent ones 

Nurses are never standing still. They have a long list of responsibilities, from responding to patients to entering important information.  

Not all healthcare organizations have technological solutions to handle these tasks, so the trouble begins with determining what should be tackled first.  

Especially in the NICU, nurses are bombarded with alerts that provide little to no context. If your system can’t differentiate between patient safety risks and a squirmy baby that accidentally kicked off his pulse oximeter, your care teams must make a quick decision about what deserves their attention.  

A solution built for effective nursing communication makes prioritization easy with color-coded alerts, different audible tones, and patient information right at their fingertips. For nurse call alerts, your clinicians can even call back to the patient’s pillow speaker to better understand their request.  

By reducing friction and frustration, alert prioritization is essential for healthcare workflow management.  

5. Provide a transparency perspective of your workflows  

The last step to improve your nursing communication techniques is the least technical, but arguably the most important: spotlighting your workflows.  

Workflows are not meant to be invisible and should be frequently reviewed and discussed to foster innovation. Discuss with your team to ask, “What’s working?” and “How else can we improve?” 

With enterprise solutions, your organization can build workflows with flexible templates that enhance communication and collaboration in nursing.  

All in all, effective clinical workflows require team-wide understanding, commitment to performance improvement, and creation of best practices. Invest time with your team to streamline your operations, and you’ll reap the rewards of better patient care.