Healthcare’s frontline is under pressure. With workforce shortages straining operations across industry sectors, health systems are being forced to rethink traditional care delivery models. As McKinsey Health Institute’s Heartbeat of Health: Reimagining the Healthcare Workforce of the Future report notes, “Closing [the workforce gap] will require transforming healthcare service delivery—reimagining who provides healthcare, how services are delivered, and where care is accessed.”
To meet the moment, healthcare organizations must embrace innovations that help care teams “grow, thrive, and stay,” according to McKinsey. Growth begins with attracting new talent, expanding education pipelines, and offering more flexible training pathways to accelerate workforce entry. But getting clinicians in the door is only part of the solution.
To thrive, health systems must maximize task sharing, freeing up clinical time through smarter workflows, AI, and automation. Giving bedside and virtual care teams the tools to divide and conquer routine work is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s essential for operational resilience. And to get top talent to stay, organizations need to dramatically improve the day-to-day experience of clinicians, reducing stress, streamlining processes, and restoring joy to practice.
This is where Smart Room technology is stepping in.
Once seen as futuristic, Smart Room platforms and the collaborative programs they enable, such as Virtual Nursing, are now modern-day answers to frontline burnout. By enabling collaborative task management between bedside and remote teams, these solutions are helping early adopters rethink care models, with many looking to expand program scope and use cases.
But with this shift comes a new operational challenge: How do you manage a growing list of clinical tasks across distributed teams without relying on the phone or overwhelming staff with alerts?
Centralized communication and task visibility is essential. As health systems adopt more team-based care models, the ability to coordinate clinical workflows across dispersed teams — without reverting to pagers, phone calls, or fragmented messaging — is critical.
Caregility’s Answer: Coordinated Task Management
Caregility’s virtual workflow tools are purpose-built to support this collaborative model of care. With iCare Coordinator, virtual nurses can assign, manage, and track tasks in real time through a centralized interface, creating a seamless handoff between virtual and bedside teams.
Bedside vLert buttons streamline communication and escalation protocols, ensuring the right team members are notified based on role, location, or urgency, eliminating the delay of manual outreach.
This centralized approach to task management and communication provides a shared source of truth that benefits all members of the care team.
For Virtual Clinical Teams:
Remote nurses and virtual support staff gain a clear, real-time view of patient assignments and task status. With access to unified workflows and support request queues, they can proactively work with bedside colleagues without disrupting in-person care delivery. They’re not left guessing who needs what—they’re empowered to engage with purpose.
For Bedside Teams:
Bedside teams benefit from visibility into remote task ownership and real-time updates, eliminating guesswork and reducing disruptions. With a closed communication loop, bedside teams can trust that nothing falls through the cracks and that help is just a click away. On-site clinicians stay focused on direct patient care without being pulled away to respond to tasks that can be supported remotely (i.e., admission history, discharge education, pain assessment, etc.).
For Clinical Leadership:
For nurse managers, granular reporting on task mix and completion rates by unit, role, and type opens the door to measurable time savings and workflow optimization. Centralized platforms provide actionable insights into task volume, response times, and performance by unit or shift, making it easier to spot bottlenecks, demonstrate ROI, and guide future resource planning.
The Path to Synchronized, Sustainable Care
As the McKinsey Heartbeat of Health report makes clear, the path to closing the healthcare workforce gap lies in reimagining who delivers care, how it’s delivered, and where it takes place. Connected care solutions help clinical teams move in harmony. These tools don’t just keep teams connected—they amplify team performance, reduce friction, and help you build a more resilient care model that maximizes limited resources.
Centralized communication and intelligent task coordination are critical enablers of this workforce shift. By giving virtual team resources the ability to engage proactively, bedside clinicians the space to focus on high-touch care, and leaders the insights to guide performance, health systems can grow stronger, operate smarter, and create the kind of environment where clinicians want to stay.
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