MedBridge Roundtable: Best Practices from Organizations Using the Clinical Procedure Manual

Before performing challenging or complex skills, home health nurses often need to review proper procedure guidelines at the point of care. But for many nurses, the guidance they need is either buried in a cumbersome physical manual, hard to access on a company intranet, or simply insufficient or outdated. As a result, nurses often resort to anxiously searching for skill instructions on Google and YouTube—a broken process that is only adding to the ongoing burnout crisis in home health.

That’s why earlier this year MedBridge launched the Clinical Procedure Manual (CPM), a tablet-first point-of-care solution that allows nurses to learn a new skill or get a quick refresher from anywhere—even a patient’s driveway.

Now that home health agencies have been using the CPM for several months, we recently held a roundtable session to share insights and best practices from experts, advisors, and early adopters who helped to develop the CPM and test best practices. The session included MedBridge experts Mitch Comstock, Aubree Colorito, Adam Siegel, and Anna Zimmerman; two members of our nurse advisory board, Danielle Pierotti, RN, PhD, CENP, and Margherita Labson, RN, BSN, MSHSA; and Senior Vice President of AngMar Medical Holdings, Sheila Parker.

In this article, you’ll get an overview of the tips and strategies discussed during the roundtable so that your agency can get the most out of the MedBridge Clinical Procedure Manual. While these strategies can be used with any CPM, our digital tablet-friendly manual offers features that make best practices easier to incorporate and adapt.

Using the CPM for Onboarding and Ongoing Training

Orient Nurses to the CPM Early On

Danielle Pierotti noted the advantages of integrating the CPM into the onboarding process for new hires to help ensure that from day one nurses are familiar with where to find essential procedures and guidelines. “Grounding any kind of education or competency checking in the same manual reminds nurses where to go for information,” she said.

Incorporate the CPM on an Ongoing Basis

Use the CPM for ongoing training and as a reference for competency evaluations to help reinforce its importance and utility.

Optimizing Daily Operations

Ensure Quick Reference in the Field

Having a CPM that’s readily accessible on tablets or mobile devices allows nurses to quickly reference procedures while in the patient’s home, and the MedBridge CPM’s full-screen mode in particular offers a clutter-free view of procedures.

CPM Full-Screen Mode

Improve Patient Education

Nurses can use the visual and video resources within the CPM to better educate patients and their families on the care they’re receiving during visits and how to perform self care between visits. “The visual layout allows nurses to show procedures to patients or families, enhancing understanding and engagement,” noted Pierotti.

Promoting Care Consistency

Standardize Practices

Margherita Labson pointed out that using the CPM to standardize practices across all teams helps maintain consistency in patient care and simplifies training and supervision. “The MedBridge CPM is really clearly laid out to ensure a consistent level of practice regardless of a nurse’s background,” said Labson.

Improve Regulatory Compliance

Labson also noted that using the CPM to ensure clinicians are following evidence-based procedures can help organizations better maintain compliance with state and federal accrediting organizations. “One way to make performance evaluations much easier is to use the procedure videos in the CPM to create checklists for assessing whether clinicians are following proper protocols. Then you can send clinicians right back to the course if you need to remediate performance gaps,” she said.

Leveraging Feedback

Invite Team Feedback

Regularly gather and implement feedback from your team to enhance the CPM’s effectiveness, whether that means tailoring existing workflows within your organization or requesting additional procedures and features. Sheila Parker observed that when her clinicians come back with requests for more content, she’s able to relay the requests to MedBridge. From there, MedBridge addresses the requests by expanding skill and procedure content to fill any gaps.

Incorporate Beta Testing

To help make adoption of new features or updates as smooth as possible, perform beta testing with a small group of users before a full rollout to identify and address any issues.

Supporting Managers and Supervisors

Promote Care Consistency and Save Time with Remote Support Functions

Busy managers and supervisors often get calls from nurses in the field looking for procedure guidance. Help them save time by using the CPM’s share feature, which makes real-time problem solving and guidance easier and faster by allowing them to share specific procedures directly with nurses in the field. This feature also helps ensure consistency in how procedures are communicated and followed. “In field testing, we saw that having an office-based team using the same material as the field-based team opens up lots of doors and really improves communication patterns,” said Pierotti.

Leverage the CPM for Performance Evaluations

Using the CPM for structured performance evaluations and remediation can also help ensure that all staff are following standardized procedures.

Preparing for Future Expansions

Anticipate Growth

Plan to incorporate additional procedures and settings into your CPM usage as MedBridge expands its content library. “We’re committed to ensuring that the Clinical Procedure Manual is as user-friendly, efficient, and valuable to clinicians as possible, and we take feedback from our clients seriously,” said MedBridge’s Anna Zimmerman. “We’re continuing to expand procedures to make the CPM even more robust and meet their needs.”

Want to learn more about how the MedBridge Clinical Procedure Manual can support and empower your nurses at the point of care? Request a demo.