Clinician workflow observation clarified what a remote-monitoring innovation would need to do, and avoid, to fit into real hospital operations.

Client Goal

A healthcare technology company wanted to understand how its remote-monitoring platform could be incorporated into general care floor workflows across hospital settings.
The goal was to identify where the platform could create meaningful value, which use cases had the strongest adoption potential, and what product or implementation requirements would need to be addressed before broader commercialization.

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Decision at Stake

The central decision was how to position and refine the platform so it could improve clinical workflow, reduce alarm-related disruption, and support safer, more efficient patient monitoring.

The organization needed to understand whether the platform would solve problems nurses and hospital leaders actually experienced — or whether it risked adding another layer of technology to an already complex clinical environment.

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Background

Hospital monitoring workflows are highly variable and shaped by the realities of frontline care.

Across general care floors, nurses were managing pulse oximetry, telemetry, infusion pumps, charting, alarm response, and competing patient-care demands. Monitoring technology was already present, but notification methods, alarm ownership, documentation practices, and communication protocols varied significantly by hospital and unit.

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The challenge was not whether remote monitoring could provide value. The question was whether it could fit into the way nurses actually work.

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What We Did

The AND Group designed and led a workflow observation study across three hospitals, including multiple general care floor units and both day and night shifts.

The study examined how alarms were generated, noticed, escalated, communicated, responded to, and documented. It also explored how nurses used existing monitoring systems, where workflow breakdowns occurred, and what conditions would be required for a remote-monitoring platform to be viewed as helpful rather than burdensome.

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What Changed


The findings clarified that the platform’s value would depend less on the existence of remote-monitoring capability and more on how well it addressed real clinical workflow pain points.

The strongest opportunity was to help clinicians identify the location, type, and severity of alarms more quickly; reduce unnecessary disruption from non-clinically significant alarms; improve alarm-response coordination; and make patient-monitoring information more visible where nurses were already working.

The work also surfaced important adoption realities. Nurses were unlikely to use mobile phones as the primary access point. The platform needed to be easily visible from central nursing stations, in-room computers, or workstations on wheels. It also needed to avoid repeated logins, minimize clicks, support fast visual triage, and integrate into existing hospital workflows.