Virtual Hospitalists Fill Need at UH Conneaut and UH Geneva

UH Clnical Update | December 2024

UH Conneaut and Geneva medical centers have found a creative solution for patients who require care from a hospitalist overnight. Instead of the typical practice of calling and waking up the hospitalist on call, nurses are now working with virtual hospitalists who are already awake and working down the highway at UH Beachwood Medical Center.

“Being very thoughtful about how we protect sleep time and the first phone call to physicians on call overnight, as well as supporting the nurses and patients in the hospital at night, we thought of the UH Beachwood hospitalists,” says Jonathan Sague, DNP, ACNP-BC, EMT-P, Chief Operating Officer at UH Conneaut, UH Geauga and UH Geneva medical centers. “They are already on duty, at work, and awake. They also have capacity to be able to help us. Therefore, the attending physician of record during the day can sleep and rest up so that they can come back tomorrow morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and make good decisions for our patients.”

Here’s how it works: When a UH Conneaut or UH Geneva patient needs the care of a hospitalist during the night, a nurse makes a call to the virtual hospitalist at UH Beachwood Medical Center. He or she then positions the patient care robot to provide the virtual hospitalist with crucial data on the patient.

“It has a high-tech camera on it and tools like a stethoscope, so they can hear the patient’s lungs through the technology,” Sague says. “The clinician on the other end can take over the camera and zoom in on areas of the body they want to see. It can detect whether they're using their belly to breathe or can zoom in on a rash or mottling on their skin, or whatever it might be. That helps them out significantly with their medical decision-making.”

Although this virtual hospitalist service has been in effect for just about 60 days, Sague says it’s already clear that it provides benefits for patients and caregivers alike. Patients get the care they need from providers already awake and alert, the attending hospitalist and nurse practitioners at work during the day can hand-off to the virtual hospitalist at the end of the shift, and nurses have an easy-to-access, go-to resource at night.

“The nurses love it more than anybody,” Sague says. “They've noticed the impact of this more than anyone else in the equation. They love how attentive that these physicians are to them, how quickly they respond, and how much help they provide.”

The fact that UH Conneaut and UH Geneva are Critical Access Hospitals – often very busy – makes creative staffing solutions a must, Sague says.

“We're very, very busy at UH Geneva,” he says. “The house is usually full every day. It's not uncommon to have 20 patients in the ED and several waiting for a bed to go upstairs or needing to transfer out on any given day. Patients need our care, but when you're leveraging technology, there's no drive time. You're instantly there to support the team in need.”

Because virtual hospitalists have already proven successful at UH Conneaut and UH Geneva, they’ll now be expanding their services to the UH Ahuja observation unit. That change is underway this month.

According to Jonathan Sague, this is likely to be the wave of the future.

“Being able to resource multiple hospitals with a physician specialist from one central location, just by using technology -- health systems that figure this out early are going to win, because that is how we're going to have to solve our physician staffing needs in certain locations or with specific physician specialists.”