Nurses Don’t Need More Complexity. They Need Their Time Back.

Editor’s note: The author is Senior Vice President of Growth and Commercial Strategy (US) at Navenio, a healthcare technology company focused on workflow coordination. Nurse.org received no compensation for this article.

Having worked in a busy emergency department, I often described the environment as “organized chaos.” There were shifts when we were operating at full capacity, patients were overflowing into hallways, trauma patients continued arriving, and nurses were managing five or six patients at a time, each with different levels of acuity and needs. In those moments, every second mattered. The last thing I wanted to do was leave a patient’s bedside to search for a piece of equipment, track down a colleague, or figure out who was available to help with a task. My priority was providing safe, timely patient care, not navigating operational inefficiencies.

Looking back, I often wonder how much more we could have accomplished if the right people, equipment, and resources had been available exactly when we needed them. Nurses shouldn’t have to work around broken processes just to do their jobs effectively.

Individually, these activities may seem insignificant. Collectively, they represent an enormous operational burden. Nurses are not always overwhelmed by the clinical care itself. Sometimes, they’re overwhelmed by everything required just to deliver that care.

We spend considerable time discussing nursing shortages, staffing ratios, and burnout. These are legitimate and urgent challenges. But we should also be asking a different question: what if we could give nurses more time without asking them to work harder?

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Consider a nurse caring for several patients during a busy shift. A patient needs assistance. A piece of equipment cannot be located. Another patient is waiting for transport. A colleague needs help, but the right person isn’t immediately available. None of these situations is unusual. Yet each requires the nurse to interrupt an existing task, identify the appropriate resource, communicate a request, and potentially follow up multiple times.

Research shows these operational barriers are more than minor inconveniences. A study published in Nursing Research in 2023, using survey data from 11,709 registered nurses across 415 U.S. hospitals, found that 42.2% of nurses reported frequent work interruptions or delays due to insufficient staffing, and 34.9% reported frequent interruptions or delays due to missing supplies or broken equipment. Additionally, 27.5% reported spending a large part of their workday on workarounds for operational problems.

A separate 2023 time-and-motion study observed 21 nurses and recorded 7,240 tasks. Approximately 30% of observed nursing time involved direct patient care and medication administration. Researchers also documented 556 interruptions during the observations.

Every unnecessary interruption represents time and attention diverted from something else.

Healthcare has invested heavily in digital transformation. Electronic health records, communication platforms, mobile applications, and monitoring systems have fundamentally changed how nurses work.

But digitizing a process does not necessarily make it more efficient. The National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being emphasizes the importance of reducing unnecessary administrative burdens and improving the systems that healthcare professionals rely on to deliver care. Technology should support clinicians by simplifying workflows rather than introducing additional complexity.

If a nurse must navigate multiple applications, repeatedly enter information, or manually coordinate activities between departments, we haven’t really improved the workflow. We’ve simply digitized the inefficiency.

Think about the moments that actually eat time in a shift. A nurse walking two units to find an infusion pump. Three phone calls to confirm transport is on its way. A request for help that reaches the wrong person and has to be routed again. These are not clinical judgment problems. They are coordination problems. And they are what the next generation of healthcare technology should focus on, less on adding information and more on coordinating action, so that the right people, equipment, and support reach the bedside when they are needed.

Artificial intelligence is receiving considerable attention across healthcare for documentation, clinical decision support, and predictive analytics. One of its potentially valuable applications may be far less visible: helping hospitals coordinate everyday operations. Real-time information about equipment availability, staff location, task status, and operational demand could support better decisions, with fewer phone calls and manual handoffs. That is a shift from simply collecting information to using it to coordinate work.

Of course, technology alone cannot resolve workflow challenges. Any implementation must address privacy, cybersecurity, clinical safety, accessibility, staff acceptance, and the risk of creating additional alerts or interruptions. Success should not be measured by the number of new tools deployed. It should be measured by whether nurses experience fewer unnecessary interruptions, less duplicated work, and more opportunities to focus on patients.

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When evaluating operational improvement initiatives, nursing leaders should consider three questions.

1. Where are nurses losing time? Look beyond documentation. Examine equipment searches, communication delays, coordination activities, unnecessary travel, and repetitive requests.
2. Which activities truly require a nurse? Nursing expertise should be directed toward assessment, clinical decision-making, patient education, and interventions that require professional judgment. Appropriate delegation and better coordination can help protect that time. We want all personnel operating at their highest licensure.
3. Are we measuring the right outcomes? Technology adoption and operational efficiency matter, but so do the experiences of nurses and patients. Organizations should evaluate time spent on nonclinical tasks, interruptions, response times, staff satisfaction, and whether redesigned workflows improve care delivery.

Most importantly, bedside nurses must help design and evaluate these changes.

We cannot solve every challenge facing nursing through technology. We still need appropriate staffing, supportive leadership, safe working conditions, and meaningful investment in the profession. But we should not accept inefficient workflows as an unavoidable part of nursing.

As someone who began at the bedside and now works at the intersection of clinical operations and healthcare technology, I believe we have an opportunity to rethink how hospitals support the people delivering care. The future of nursing should not require clinicians to become better at navigating operational complexity. It should require healthcare organizations to eliminate as much unnecessary complexity as possible.

Nurses don’t need another task added to their day. They need fewer barriers between themselves and their patients.

One of the most meaningful innovations we can deliver is something nurses have been asking for all along: more time to care.

🤔 Nurses: what’s one coordination task that eats more of your shift than it should? Share your experience in the comments.