Virtual Nursing at UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Connects Kids to Care

Innovations in Pediatrics | Summer 2025

How can you simultaneously enhance patient care while addressing the factors that lead to nursing turnover? At University Hospitals, a potential solution underway is a hybrid model for virtual nursing called the Connected Care Team Platform.

Jennifer Carpenter, DNP, RN

How does it work? Select floors and units across the health system, including a step-down floor at UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital that cares for many children with tracheostomies and who are ventilator-dependent, are now equipped with advanced high-resolution cameras and audio systems to facilitate a view between the patient room and the virtual nurse. The cameras are powerful enough to zoom in on the small print on a medication bottle so that it can be easily read by the virtual nurse. The patients and families see the virtual nurse through their TV screen. Proposals are in place to expand this technology across the health system.

However, to maintain cohesion and seamless care, the UH platform is designed so that nurses on the hospital unit rotate between bedside care and virtual care. Those on the virtual team that day, housed in an administrative building, are familiar with the patients and the unit and can help their bedside nurse colleagues with tasks they can more easily accomplish, such as talking with the patient and family, monitoring vital signs and others.

“We believe that the relationship with the virtual nurses who are sometimes on the floor is important and valuable in a different way,” says Jennifer Carpenter, DNP, RN, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer of University Hospitals. “That’s why we chose this model. On UH Rainbow 5, for example, there are nurses who sometimes work on the unit and sometimes work as the remote nurse. They’re still part of the team, and they participate in rounds. That whole floor is part of their assignment when they're working as a remote nurse. Because they know the patients, they pop in and out of the rooms just like they would if they were there. They just do that remotely.”

Dr. Carpenter says the pediatric patients and their families on UH Rainbow 5 have embraced the new nursing model. Kids and teens, in particular, are native users of technology, so the fact that it has come to the hospital room isn’t all that different for them, she says. Nurses introduce themselves when they see the patient in person and let them know they will be their virtual nurse later in the week, which makes patients and families even more comfortable.

“The nursing part stays the same,” adds Brian Nelson, Program Lead for the UH Veale Healthcare Transformation Institute, which has supported this work. “What you really see is including the family more in pediatrics, which is always our goal.”

UH Rainbow is also expanding virtual technology to other positions that serve pediatric patients and others. Jobs as sitters or patient observers are notoriously difficult to fill – a problem that virtual employment might help solve.

“One person must stay in the patient room for certain risks, but for other children, the observer would have four patients and the ability to zoom in the camera onto whatever they want to see in the room,” Dr. Carpenter says. “Our vision is that over the course of the next few years, all units that can be wired would be part of that. We would have essentially a command center for pediatric care that allows virtual nursing, virtual consults, virtual family visits, virtual translation, all the things. It's another tool in our tool belt, not just virtual nursing.”

She says she also envisions a time when virtual technology would help parents and their children make a good transition home from the hospital – when they don’t have access to reliable home care.

“Some kids and families suffer by being in the hospital much longer than is medically necessary because there's not home nursing care available,” she says. “My grand vision is that we develop some capabilities with virtual care and artificial intelligence to be able to bridge those gaps in the home, providing safety and nursing expertise and enabling children to be home where they can thrive and grow and be normal kids. We want to be on the early side of that.”

For more information about virtual nursing at UH Rainbow, please email Peds.Innovations@UHhospitals.org.

Contributing Expert:
Jennifer Carpenter, DNP, RN
Chief Nursing Informatics Officer
University Hospitals