06 Feb 2025
“This is how I do it.” As a Philips product manager, this is a phrase I’ve heard from numerous seasoned clinicians as they explain their approach to managing complex patient care. In fact, it is a phrase I often used myself when I was a critical care nurse. This phrase isn’t about ignoring protocols or cutting corners—it’s about solving problems. These individualized workflows emerge from a need to make sense of fragmented data or streamline processes in ways that existing systems don’t fully support.
For clinicians and healthcare leadership, the words “This is how I do it,” are a clarion call to evaluate workflows. Such evaluation brings the gaps that disrupt workflow into sharp focus. When challenges are clearly defined, leadership is better able to select technology that eliminates the need for on-the-fly solutions and standardizes best practices, leading to enhanced efficiency, streamlined clinical decision-making and perhaps even improved patient outcomes.
Complex workflows in data-intensive settings
Individualized workflows are particularly rampant in high-stakes environments where clinicians rely on data from multiple devices and systems to assess and treat patients.
For example, as a nurse I often managed patients with multi-organ failure. I integrated data from the ventilator, continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) machine and invasive hemodynamic monitoring —all while documenting trends in the EMR. Each of these systems provided vital insights, but because they didn’t communicate and share data effectively with one another, I became the hub for piecing everything together.
Many of my colleagues found themselves in the same situation, and devised their own solutions for working around system limitations. Do any of these examples sound familiar?
- A nurse managing multiple devices toggles between screens or manually documents key metrics on a scratch pad to compare live trends over time from a ventilator, a CRRT machine and an arterial line.
- A respiratory therapist creates a log to capture ventilator changes and match them with blood gas results that are not displayed in the same system.
- An intensivist reviewing data from multiple infusion pumps relies on memory or manual aggregation to calculate total fluid balance and adjust treatments accordingly.
In each of these cases, the “work-around” gets the job done, but at the cost of time and the risk of human error. Savvy healthcare leaders recognize that providing solutions that eliminate the need for work-arounds has far-reaching effects on both the efficiency and effectiveness of care.
Stepping into the breach: clinical surveillance systems
Clinical surveillance systems are one such solution. They are specifically designed to standardize, streamline and optimize workflows by continuously analyzing live, streaming medical data and providing a holistic view of patient status. And a robust clinical surveillance system can bridge the gap between data gathering and clinical insights, presenting information such as waveforms, trends, events and history in a format that mimics the very best “work-arounds” – but with increased efficiency and decreased cognitive load.
Let’s look at a few modality-specific examples and explore how clinical surveillance systems can make a difference.
Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) specialists might use sticky notes or whiteboards to track pump flow and gas settings because the system doesn’t provide a clear, real-time view of these changes alongside patient trends.
A clinical surveillance solution can integrate real-time ECMO data with patient monitoring systems, presenting a consolidated view of pump flow, sweep gas settings and patient hemodynamics on a single view. This eliminates the need for manual tracking so that trends are readily accessible for decision-making.
A dialysis nurse operating CRRT often manually logs filter pressures, fluid balances and clotting times because their systems don’t consolidate and display these values or trends effectively.
A clinical surveillance solution can automatically capture and aggregate CRRT values and settings, such as filter pressures, fluid removal rates and cumulative balances, displaying them alongside vital signs and hemodynamic data. This reduces manual logging and provides actionable insights for therapy adjustments.
Cardiovascular nurses review timing ratios, augmentation trends and the broader hemodynamic picture by moving between the intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) console and other monitors and mentally aligning the data.
A clinical surveillance solution can integrate IABP data with other hemodynamic values, creating a unified display that overlays timing ratios, augmentation trends and patient vitals. This simplifies data interpretation, reduces cognitive load and helps support timely interventions.
Critical care nurses plot device data on paper or scroll back through saved monitor data to spot trends that indicate patient deterioration.
A clinical surveillance solution can monitor these trends and send an alert to the bedside nurse when patient data falls outside of parameters based on established guidelines and aligned to clinical needs. This reduces the nurse’s cognitive load and provides objective notification of patient deterioration.
Turning “This is how I do it” into “This is how it should work”
When clinicians say, “This is how I do it,” they’re telling you something important. They’ve found ways to manage inefficiencies, but that doesn’t mean they should have to. To uncover the hidden gaps that are driving individualized workflows, leaders must actively observe workflows in practice and ask caregivers questions like:
- What do you do to make managing multiple devices easier?
- How do you track trends across systems?
- What adjustments have you made to your workflow when the data doesn’t flow the way you need it to?
Next, leaders should explore solutions, such as clinical surveillance solutions, that close the gaps. In addition, healthcare workflows aren’t static, but shift with patient needs, new technology and evolving practices; therefore, workflow evaluation is not a one-time task. Building regular workflow evaluations and feedback loops into department assessments is key to ensuring systems remain aligned with clinical needs.
When I worked in the hospital, I found this practice of regularly investigating work-arounds and then implementing workflow solutions that eliminated them enabled our team to increase both efficiency and staff satisfaction. Now that I work for Philips, I still ask these questions, because our customers’ answers help me ensure that our products are meeting real needs.
Are you interested in learning more?
Philips has helped numerous organizations achieve care objectives by integrating data and streamlining clinical workflows. Contact us today to speak with an expert in implementing clinical data technologies.
About the author
Wade Flood is an RN and the Senior Product Manager of Capsule Surveillance at Philips.
Learn about Philips Capsule Surveillance.
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