University Hospitals scales virtual nursing model to full-hospital deployment
Hospitals nationwide are facing intensifying staffing pressures, rising patient acuity and growing demands for more sustainable care delivery. At Cleveland-based University Hospitals, a new virtual nursing initiative is offering an effective, systemwide solution.
During an October webinar hosted by Becker’s Healthcare and Vitalchat, Brian Nelson, RN, program lead and Lauren Yanus, RN, platform lead, at the University Hospitals Veale Healthcare Transformation Institute, shared how their team scaled virtual nursing across an entire facility and why clinical co-design is central to the program’s success.
Here are four key takeaways from the session:
1. Virtual care’s critical impact
Nelson and Yanus emphasized that virtual nurses are an extension of the bedside team, not a substitute.
Virtual team members assist with admissions, discharges, medication verification, fall prevention and patient and family education. Cameras and audio are activated only with permission and not used for surveillance, a distinction reinforced in patient-facing videos and messaging.
“Our virtual nurse is an integral team member,” said Mr. Nelson. “They are there to support our bedside caregivers and connect our patients with their loved ones or other care providers so that they can either get home or get further care.”
2. Scaling systemwide
University Hospitals’ virtual nursing journey began with five units across four hospitals in May 2024. These included medical-surgical floors, an ICU and a pediatric unit.
After testing workflows and stabilizing technology, the team launched a full-hospital implementation at Lake West in July 2025, activating virtual care across 146 rooms, including emergency, ICU and step-down units. Rapid infrastructure updates helped minimize disruption and enabled swift deployment.
“We ran that pilot to look at how we stabilize technology.” Mr. Nelson said. “It started with the very basic use cases of admissions and discharges and really left the other side to be open, teach us what we don’t know, let the nurses be innovative and let’s add additional use cases.”
3. ‘The secret sauce’
A central theme of the program is empowering frontline nurses.
“The managers, the CNOs, the bedside staff are the ones who help build all these use cases,” Nelson said. “They’re the innovative ones. We provide the platform. They teach us what we don’t know.”
Ms. Yanus described design sessions that included operations leaders, educators and nurses, where “no idea was off the table.” That collaborative spirit has been key to acceptance and sustainability.
“I refer to this as our secret sauce,” said Ms. Yanus. “Having all of these team members come together at the beginning helps keep them engaged throughout the process.”
4. Measurable results
The program has already shown quantifiable benefits. In September alone, virtual nurses completed 513 of 616 admissions, giving back over 250 hours to bedside teams. They also handled 291 discharges, returning another 135 hours.
Lake West’s caregiver engagement scores have improved across the board and the hospital is seeing earlier discharges and faster post-discharge processing. An internal study also showed a 78% reduction in patient falls on units with virtual nursing.
As the program grows, University Hospitals is piloting virtual patient observers, expanding cross-coverage staffing and exploring use cases from family visitation to specialty consults.
“Virtual care platforms allow us to build safer hospitals, more efficient teams and make the patients part of our team,” Mr. Nelson said. “It’s making the caregivers feel like they are heard and that’s important to really drive innovation as we look at how we scale across the system.”
To listen to a recording of the Webinar, click here or visit www.vitalchat.com.
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