6 Strategies for Choosing the Best Procedure Manual for Your Organization

A recent study highlighted on Home Care Health News revealed that home care turnover has increased by more than 12 percent over the past two years, while the current industry-wide turnover rate is 79.2 percent. With these alarming statistics in mind, we need to be doing everything that we can to ensure that home health nurses have what they need to succeed from day one and beyond. Since a majority of their time is spent out in the field, providing them with the best procedure manual will be vital to their continued success.

MedBridge has its own digital Clinical Procedure Manual (CPM) that provides trustworthy just-in-time training by combining fast and easy search functionality with a growing library of over 200 evidence-based home health-specific procedures in both video and article format, all created and approved by an expert nursing panel.

Is this the right procedure manual for you? Find out with these six strategies to select the best clinical procedures manual for your organization.

1. Assessing Your Needs

First, it starts with understanding the specific needs of your organization. Since each organization will be different, you can start by considering the working environment of your home health nurses. What is your current procedure manual solution? If it’s a binder full of printed procedures, is it located at the home office or do your clinicians have access to it in the field? And what happens if they can’t find the procedure they’re looking for?

If you have three nurses in the field trying to reach their manager for advice at the same time, you’ll have two patients who will have to wait until they can get the help they need. By utilizing a digital clinical procedures manual, each nurse can access a library of procedures from their tablet or mobile device whenever they need it.

2. Evaluating Content Quality

Next, you’ll want to evaluate your current content quality and ensure your procedure manual is comprehensive and up-to-date. Different manuals will have different levels of content coverage and accuracy, but organizations want to avoid nurses searching independently for the specific procedures on YouTube, which can lead to inconsistent care and the risk of using instructions that are not evidence-based. If a nurse can’t find a procedure in their binder or get a hold of their director, it’s not uncommon for a nurse to search YouTube in a last-ditch effort to find the correct procedure. They’ll search through hundreds of results hoping to find the right procedure, but even if they find what looks like the right procedure, how can they be sure that it has been vetted and is being demonstrated correctly?

With MedBridge’s Clinical Procedure Manual, nurses can be confident that every procedure is based on evidence-based practices vetted by industry experts. Our CPM Nurse Review Board ensures that MedBridge’s best-in-class home health products and content are accurate, evidence-based, and true to the real-world challenges that frontline nurses face in the field.

3. Digital vs. Physical: The Benefits of Going Digital/Tablet-First

The ‘Big Binder’ may have served us well for years, but there are too many advantages to a digital manual to ignore any longer. Not only is it simpler to find the correct procedure, you can access them anytime, anywhere. Wound care dressing your nurse hasn’t performed in a while? With a simple search, they can find the procedure, watch an engaging video demonstrating it, and perform the procedure with the assurance that it has been vetted and reviewed by industry experts.

And instead of having to manually edit, add, and remove procedures and training materials to the big binder every time an update is needed, digital tablet-first solutions update automatically in real-time.

4. User Experience and Accessibility

Time is of the essence when a nurse is in the field. When the minutes are ticking away while the nurse is in the patient’s driveway, they need to find the procedure they’re looking for quickly. That’s why it’s important to have a user-friendly interface for quick reference in the field.

Remember the YouTube problem? The results are unreliable, but what YouTube is good at is surfacing results fast. Our Clinical Procedure Manual’s tablet-first design helps home health nurses search for and easily find the skills guidance they need from anywhere—even a patient’s driveway. It gives you the speed and searchability of YouTube, but with the added advantage that all procedures are aligned with evidence-based research and professional guidelines. Bad internet connection? Not a problem with accessibility features like offline access, which can be a huge difference maker with home care patients in rural settings.

5. Integration with Current Workflows

Nurses are already busy driving from patient to patient, and adding yet another workflow to a nurses’ schedule is not going to help matters. What you need is a comprehensive end-to-end onboarding and training platform that works with your procedure manual to support nurses and admin staff from day one and beyond.

Comprehensive solutions like MedBridge In-Home Essentials help boost staff retention and improve outcomes with a single easy-to-use integrated digital platform. MedBridge’s wider selection of educational courses in flexible microlearning formats, combined with an online Clinical Procedure Manual, allows nurses to build upon their onboarding foundation as well as easily and quickly search for approved, evidence-based procedures from anywhere.

On top of that, MedBridge can coordinate patient management programs, eliminating the need to log in multiple times across different apps to perform frequent job functions like entering patient data and accessing procedure instructions, making nurses’ lives easier and saving time.

6. Training and Support

Just-in-time training in the field is just one component for success. Ongoing training and support for clinicians creates a foundation for success both now and in the future.

MedBridge onboarding, training, and CPM content empower nurses with up-to-date education on the most critical job-related skills developed and reviewed by leading home health experts and accredited by the ANCC. This content has all been specifically built for home health, and provides end-to-end procedure instructions that help nurses accurately perform and document procedures, as well as tips on what education the patient needs to support self management of their care.

What’s Next

Selecting a Clinical Procedure Manual is a pivotal decision. Choosing the right one will not only improve the workflow of your nurses, but also the quality of care that their patients  receive. With MedBridge’s CPM, you can support nurses at the point of care with a home health-focused skills resource that is as flexible and agile as they are. 

This includes our:

Evidence-Based Procedure Library
Boost confidence with accredited and certified procedure content created and reviewed by an expert nursing panel.

Tablet-First Design
Provide your nurses with an immediate reference to a wide range of clinical procedures anywhere, anytime.

Fast Search Functionality
Quickly find evidence-based procedures with step-by-step instructions, video tutorials, best practices and more.

Learn more about our Clinical Procedure Manual, or request a demo to discuss making the switch to digital with one of our dedicated team members.