Karen Alsever is a virtual nurse at St. Joseph's Health. The virtual nurses were implemented back in September in the adult care and cardiac rehabilitation units in order to improve the care of patients.

"The virtual nursing is the three nurses taking care of a patient, the bedside nurse, the care partner and the virtual nurse," Alsever said.

The program is called 'The Together Team Virtual Connected Care,' which is a part of Trinity Health.

"The virtual nurse is involved in mentoring the bedside nurse, the bedside RN that could be new to St. Joseph’s Health or a graduate nurse that is just starting," Alsever explained.

Alsever says as a virtual nurse, she can help with more tasks, which gives the bedside nurse more time with the patient.

"I can be doing admissions, discharges, patient education, all the things that kind of bog down an RN at the bedside," Alsever said.

"Really leaving a legacy and really helping grow the newer nurses, that’s been a huge benefit, they’re able to talk with the nurses but they’ve been able to zoom in to kind of help assess something or be a second opinion, a second set of eyes so that’s been a huge positive," Melba James, director for capacity management at St. Joseph’s Health, said.

James says as they get more comfortable with this new model, she would like to see this expand to other units.

"We would love to trial it out in our emergency room. We would love to trial it out in some of our post surgical units, like our orthopedic floor, our general surgical floor that does any kind of general G.I. surgeries, G.U. surgeries and things like that," James said.

"We’re still working out our kinks, but we have seen patient satisfaction, family satisfaction where the virtual nurse is able to connect with the family which is something that we’ve kind of lost during COVID," Alsever said.