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Saul Marquez:
Hey, everybody! Saul Marquez with the Outcomes Rocket. I want to welcome you back to the podcast today. Look, we are in a time in history where it’s never been more important to value nurses and the work that they do. And today, we have the outstanding Dr. Jing Wang with us today. She’s the dean and professor at Florida State University College of Nursing. She was previously vice dean for research at the University of Texas Health Science Center and the founding director of an Interprofessional Center on Smart and Connected Health Technologies that features an aging-in-place lab, South Texas Connected health living lab, in telehealth training and simulation. Her research uses mobile and connected technology to optimize behavioral lifestyle interventions and improve patient-centered outcomes in chronically ill and aging populations, especially among the underserved and minority populations. So she’s done many things that include being a Ted Med scholar, just a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation nurse, faculty, and many more things. With that intro, I want to welcome Jing to the podcast. Welcome.
Jing Wang:
Thank you. So glad to be here today.
Saul Marquez:
It’s great to have you here today. So, Jing, one of the things that we like to start off with is just what is it that makes you tick? What is it that inspires your work in healthcare?
Jing Wang:
Yeah, I think it’s so easy for a nurse to just have that I want to help others, and I want to serve others, and I want to save lives and improve lives. I think that’s what we do in nursing. I consider nursing as a combination of art and science that we touch people at their most joyful moments. When we welcome new babies to the world, we touch people at their most vulnerable moments and all of that, you touch people’s heart with what you do in your job. And I think that’s the most inspiring moment for me to be a nurse and to be a dean that we are educating the next generation of nurses who will do that with a science in mind that we would like to provide the best quality care for our patients. And we learn through the most rigorous approach and the best evidence for us to get there to save lives and improve lives.
Saul Marquez:
That’s really well said, Jing. You touch people’s hearts, and you help us in the worst and the best moments. And nurses are important, and the way that care is being delivered today, teledevices, wearables, and you got AI insights now, a lot of things are changing. So talk to us about how you believe what you guys are doing is adding value to the healthcare ecosystem.
Jing Wang:
So I think at Florida State University College of Nursing and being a dean, we really focus on, we’re not just educating or provide the next generation of nurses with the knowledge that they need today, but prepare them for what the future should look like in nursing and healthcare. The solid nursing skills that we are learning or we have been learning over the past 20 years are so critically important, but we cannot educate or discover knowledge, new knowledge in a vacuum or in an ivory tower. We need to connect too with the rest of the world, we need to connect to, with the current healthcare system. Just as when I was studying nursing, there was not even the smartphone. And my own personal research has evolved with PDAs, for those of people who even know what a personal digital assistant was at the time, to be smartphones and wearables, to be wireless connected devices, to be sensors at home when we talk about smart homes. People normally don’t think about nurses in the area of innovation. While we talk about mobile health and now buzzwords, digital health. Where are nurses growing next? Yes, when we graduate nurses, technology has done a change, but the mindset about how to use and develop technology that are serving our patients and make it easier, not make it harder, for our nurses, for our other healthcare professionals, and for our patients, and for our seniors. Let’s not design technologies where our seniors cannot even see when they have for hindsights, when it’s too complicated, or when there are too many alarms, it becomes there’s no alarm or no alerts. So all of the things that are core principles that are really important for nurses to know and learn and to be a key contributor, to be what technology should look like, how should technology be deployed and implemented in healthcare. So I think that’s how we at the College of Nursing can add value, is to be in partnership with healthcare systems, to be in partnership with industry, who has, always has a strategy for digital health along the technology companies. So for all of this, where we can be a partner and add value and to co-create what the future of nursing healthcare that will serve our patients better. And I think leveraging our strengths as nurses as being the most trusted professions for over 20 years now, there is a core value that nurses can provide to businesses, to innovation, to entrepreneurship, to the entire ecosystem where, when there is a patient, when there is a community, when there is individual that need care, nurses can provide that value.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic, Jing. Thank you for those wise words. And folks, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while now, you know my stance on nursing. They’re invaluable, very important resource to be considered not only in patient care, but innovation and business process. And, are we thinking about the workflow the way that we should be? It sounds, Jing, the work that you guys do at Florida State University is prepare nurses with the mindset that will equip them to deal with the changing times. So talk to us about how you believe what you’re doing is different than what’s out there and how has it improved outcomes or made business better.
Jing Wang:
So I think being someone who’s being, started in nursing and then has to grow with the technology advances in this society and in the world, I think it’s so core to remember that we start with what the workflow should look like. Over COVID, there has been more than enough studies that are showing over 50% of nurses’ time in emergency rooms in healthcare settings are spent in front of a computer. So when we talk about the critical nursing shortage, not only in the state of Florida, but almost in every state and globally, are we using the time wisely for our nurses? So that’s where I see, Saul, when we look at all of these challenges and when we look at a way of what I call high-tech site touch care is, let’s not forget it’s the care that is the focus, it’s not a technology. And when you look at the current business and current landscape of technology and digital health and overall healthcare, nurses normally are asked to evaluate and say, what do you think about this product? Will this work well? Will this help you? And we rarely see that nurses are at the stage of how developing and co-creating, what products that are already developed, and nurses are being the end users or being the best advocate for patients. We’re always on the table to tell people about the products. How do I like it? How do I not like it? Versus, this is what is needed to improve care processes, to improve workflow, to really allow me, a nurse, or a physician try to provide more personalized care, and let’s think about what should the product look like. So I think that’s the difference where I’m hoping to make, and we are making big strides in terms of launching a new institute on digital health and innovation and really focus on underserved populations and how learning from how can we design easy, but understanding patient are sometimes living with different conditions. They need to take care of a lot of things. How can we leverage AI to support our patients and our patient and healthcare professionals, what we call, usability? That if it takes so much time for a nurse or for a patient to do certain things, let’s rethink about, maybe that’s not the best use of technology, and we need to do better in developing such technology. That’s a difference that we are hoping to make, and the outcome that we are looking for is that we want to make sure that we’ll have enough nurses to provide care and to provide personalized care where our patients deserve, and they’re demanding that nowadays.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, well said. And some of the elements around change and these different technologies that you mentioned, I think they’re the things that are going to bring that job satisfaction to the nurses of today and the nurses of the future. It’s knowing that you have a safety net and a remote monitoring system or, you know, and then understanding how your work is still very important within that context. One of the things that we learn more from is our setbacks than our wins. So I’d love to hear from you, Jing, what’s one of the setbacks you’ve had or maybe you guys have experienced as an organization and a key learning that’s come out of that?
Jing Wang:
I think a major setback for me was someone was working in the area of technology, with all this evolving technology is, at the time, we were trying to develop technology that will connect remote monitoring wearables into electronic health records. It is so difficult, for a nurse, looking at different strains and trying to connect the dots and have to log into different systems when patients live with, like I said multiple conditions, and on average, an elderly will have more than 5 or 6 conditions. I can’t go into 5 or 6 websites plus electronic health records, and that’s just, that’s why we call it a fragmented system. So how can we, when we were trying to develop things at the time, that was a while back, that no healthcare system is willing to work with us and no healthcare system was ready, and have seen, you know, the power of policies. And that’s why, … way to health policy, especially in the health information technology world, this, what policy changes all the healthcare system will have said no to me, were asking me, how did you make that work initially, and what would you recommend us to adopt? When I think about innovation nurses, trying to push the right thing to happen, may not be in the right time, that you may be a little bit ahead of the curve, then no one is willing to take that risk at the time, that we actually made a decision that, okay, if there’s no hospital or healthcare system is willing to try that, then let’s focus on when that needs to happen. What should the usability look like? That’s why … into the whole area of making sure connected system, assuming that there is a national electronic system and we are connecting it and we did the whole system ourselves. What are the parameters? What are the usability factors? How can we make sure our nurses and doctors … are protected in this kind of interface? So whenever people are ready, these are the things that they will need to know in order to enable the streamlined, the connection, and in the professional world we call interoperable system with high usability that will fit the workflow. Or if it requires a redesign of the workflow, and how can we train our healthcare professionals and train our healthcare professional students, together in a team environment and don’t take it for granted? A computer scientist or engineer, or informatician can work with a nurse or doctor. Naturally, it just didn’t happen. It needs to be carefully planned, and so, I think through this whole step back and learning how to pivot really helped me and helped my team understand what is truly needed for better care and for better healthcare, leveraging the technology which, I think is a differentiator was, where we stand in the ecosystem and understanding what really needed to happen and how much money and time, energy, and human resources that we have wasted in developing things that just would not work.
Saul Marquez:
Well said, yeah, and folks, I mean, you don’t know this by now. It’s worth triple-clicking on it. If your technology is number one, not taking nurses into consideration, and number two, not integrating into the EMR, it’s not going anywhere. So make sure you’re doing that. And for the up-and-coming nurses or if you have somebody in your family that wants to become a nurse, it’s important to connect them with organizations like Florida State University, leaders like Jing, that really are laying out the framework for what is going to take to be successful as a nurse and as a leader in healthcare. So really appreciate those insights, Jing. What are you most excited about?
Jing Wang:
I’m most excited about is that we get to create what the future will look like. I think there are so many work that needs to be done, and when I see huge capital pouring into digital health and I think being the voice and being at the table, supporting what really needs to happen is what’s most exciting to me that we’re training nurses who will have the knowledge and the skills to do that, to collaborate with industry and business. And I don’t expect all the nurses to create everything on our own, right? It takes collaboration, it takes academic and industry collaboration, it takes interprofessional collaboration. And I think that’s most exciting to me is that we are bringing people who don’t normally talk in the same room to do that for the benefits of what we think the future of nursing and healthcare should look like, and we get to design that, and we’ll get … that.
Saul Marquez:
That’s super exciting. And look, we want to learn more about what you guys are up to because we also want to know where the future is going. If you can, Jing, first of all, I want to say thank you. Thank you for spending time with us today. But why don’t you leave us with a closing thought and then where the listeners could find out more about the research you guys are doing about the programs you guys offer. It would just be great to lead them towards that.
Jing Wang:
I think you can always go to Florida State University College of Nursing, our website, our social media, our research page, our Institute on Digital Health and Innovation page. You can easily Google and find us there, and we’ll have our most exciting news out there. We just finished a design sprint for students from over 30 disciplines working together to design what the future of a smart and connected home for aging in place. We are actually going to design a model home in a senior living center that will incorporate all of that. And I think the closing thoughts is that it is so critical to consider a nurse at the planning phase of any digital health and healthcare innovations, and we want to be part of the team. And as the most trusted profession that our, serve patients, and communities, and populations trust us, and we would like to use that and to contribute to the knowledge, to the future. And I think that’s my closing thought with, you know, the audience was all of you. That we’re a team player and we want to be part of how to make the world a better world.
Saul Marquez:
Outstanding. Jing, I want to thank you so much. And folks, if today’s episode resonated with you, take action, go to the show notes, click on all the links that Jing and her team are going to share with us in how you can learn more and engage with them. Jing, thanks so much for the work that you do and the powerful movement of nursing that you guys are leading.
Jing Wang:
Great. Thank you.
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