by Neelam Keny, on Sep 25, 2025 9:37:46 PM
Key takeaways from the blog
- Patient-to-nurse ratio is highly skewed because of a shortage of trained personnel and a high staff burnout rate due to rising workload and work stress related to handling patient trauma.
- Automating repetitive routine nurse duties and placing them under the new role of virtual nurse offloads the administrative tasks from the traditional nurse’s shoulders.
- The segregation of duties creates technology-assisted parallel roles and drives synergies, building a significant amount of efficiency and operational resilience in healthcare delivery.
Healthcare systems are overcrowded, and the patient to healthcare-staff ratio is highly skewed. The chronic shortage of trained staff and the increasing need for high-quality patient care are creating undue demand on healthcare systems. The hospitals and patient care providers are constantly reporting a high prevalence of understaffing and heavy workloads. To mitigate the associated risk of affecting the quality of patient care, healthcare organizations continuously build new delivery models. One of the recent shifts has been centralizing the administrative activities in healthcare under the supervision and orchestration of a virtual nurse, who manages the activities remotely from a central location in the hospital and frees the bandwidth of the traditional nurses to focus on patient care. This role churns through a heavier load of administrative activities as compared to traditional healthcare delivery models and requires automation solutions to manage day-to-day tasks.
What is a virtual nurse?
Virtual nurse is a new paradigm in healthcare delivery for streamlining healthcare operations. The role involves managing the administrative responsibilities of an army of traditional nurses or caregivers from a central location in the hospital or healthcare facility. Essentially, the role frees traditional nurses to look after patient care and wellbeing and focuses on monitoring administrative responsibilities across an entire batch of patients. It includes onboarding and offboarding patients, remote patient assessments, managing care, monitoring patient vital statistics, educating patients and their relatives, and supporting traditional nurses with caregiving directions. The role continuously monitors a whole ward or a batch of patients while managing a heavy workload of administrative tasks.
How do automation solutions enable the virtual nurse’s capabilities?
Automation solutions augment the virtual nurse capabilities with data-driven caregiving. The technologies capture data from paper-based reports, automate repetitive data-entry tasks, generate intelligent prompts and triggers for the traditional caregiver nurse, and much more. The major technologies involved in healthcare automation solutions are intelligent document processing, robotic process automation, and intelligent automation.
Intelligent document processing (IDP):
The virtual nurse receives reports in varied formats, including unstructured and semi-structured. AI-driven IDP solutions quickly classify, extract, and process the extracted data from all such documents and reports. Some of the important IDP-led automation use cases are:
- Patient onboarding: A patient who arrives at the healthcare facility has a huge volume of paperwork. It includes onboarding forms, reports, medical history questionnaires, insurance papers, etc. The AI-driven IDP solution scans these documents, extracts the required information, and integrates it with the core business systems, such as electronic health record systems. The process automation accelerates the onboarding by eliminating data entry errors and reducing rework.
- Referral management: The virtual nurse handles the different patients referred by general practitioners for specialized care. IDP solution helps extract the details from the referral documents, including the reason for the specialized care and the tests and procedures recommended. It also helps expedite the pre-authorization process with the patient’s healthcare insurance company, identify medical procedures that are not payable early on in the process, and inform the patient accordingly.
- Records management: The IDP solution helps the virtual nurse digitize different related records and organize them digitally, making the search and retrieval easier. It enables the virtual nurse to track each patient’s medical history at a centralized location and start administering the medical care at the earliest.
- Billing and coding: The solution also captures the nurse’s notes from each patient’s digital case file, which provides the details for the medical coding that is required for the billing process. It expedites the billing and the subsequent claims process.
IDP solutions, such as TruCap+ IDP, automate the process of ingesting data from different paper documents, forms, and reports, which create major backlogs and hurdles in administering healthcare procedures. They offer a holistic and real-time view of each patient in the ward, thus improving data-driven care coordination at a faster pace.
Robotic process automation (RPA):
The RPA solution automates repetitive data entries and synchronizes data across different business systems in real-time. It is a boon for data-intensive work and administrative processes. The RPA solution efficiently automates the following scenarios:
- Repetitive data entry: The RPA solution automates the process of synchronizing data from different lab machines, the doctors’ notes that are captured digitally, etc., with the electronic health record system. It eliminates human error and rework associated with manual data entry and updates the patients’ records centrally in real-time for faster retrieval at the touch of a button.
- Appointment scheduling: The technology solution enables virtual nurses to automate the coordination for new and follow-up appointments. On receiving a request for an appointment, the RPA solution checks the patient’s requirements, tracks historical data, checks the doctor’s availability, and auto-schedules an appointment. The solution also allows automating appointment reminders for the patient and creating a daily schedule for the doctor.
- Medicine list review: The virtual nurses often spend time comparing earlier and new medication regimes. The RPA solution supports the nurses in tracking a patient’s medication list vis-à-vis the earlier and new lists and highlights the changes. It significantly cuts down the time for medicine list review and safeguards the patient’s well-being.
- Patient offboarding or discharge: Once a patient has recovered and is ready for discharge, the RPA solution automatically generates the discharge card in a printable format and updates the electronic healthcare record systems accordingly. This streamlines the patient offboarding process and frees up the virtual nurse to focus on critical duties for her batch of patients.
The RPA solutions, such as the AI and GenAI-powered TruBot RPA, enable the virtual nurse to automate tedious and repetitive activities and focus on the human side of care administration, such as delivering a better patient experience.
Intelligent Automation (IA):
The IA solution takes the RPA and IDP solution approach to a new level. With its artificial intelligence algorithm-powered decision-making, it empowers the virtual nurse role with critical skill sets. Some of them are listed below:
- Early warning system: The IA solution continuously analyzes huge amounts of patient data, such as lab test parameters, monitoring readings, and trendlines, to display early warnings about adverse events. The solution proves to be critical in avoiding medical emergencies through timely healthcare interventions. The virtual nurse thereby remotely monitors an entire batch of patients and immediately alerts the traditional nurses to attend to the emergency situation on a case-by-case basis.
- Clinical documentation querying: The IA solution is adept at allowing the nurse to query on the clinical documentation to retrieve the required information. It also creates a summary of the patient’s case and appends it to the patient’s case file. GenAI and AI-assisted Copilots are capable of transcribing the voice of the nurse to text and creating a summary that integrates with the patient’s case file.
- AI-powered chatbots: The chatbots answer routine in-patient queries about healthcare, medicine, and facility information. It allows the virtual nurse to focus on more important tasks related to her batch of patients and attending to emergencies alerted by the early warning system. The solution is also applicable to out-patient queries.
The IA solution extends to many such scenarios for automating the daily grind faced by the virtual nurse. Segregating duties between man and machine enables the healthcare organization to overcome situations of trained workforce shortage and mounting stress. The IA-enabled automation solution helps build a data-driven caregiving framework that creates a win-win-win situation for the healthcare organization, nurse fraternity, and patients.
Advantages of automating healthcare functions
Healthcare automation brings forth many advantages:
- Man-machine synergies: The automation solution drives man-machine synergies through a proper segregation of duties of low acumen and high acumen that require human intervention. Augmenting the traditional nurse role with that of a virtual nurse role, which uses technological solutions for remote patient monitoring and fulfilling the associated administrative duties, facilitates seamless care delivery while effectively handling patients.
- Operations resilience: Automation coupled with segregation of nurse duties allows the healthcare organization to deliver efficient care amid growing industry pressure despite a trained staff shortage and the demand for high-quality patient care to efficiently handle patient trauma. It builds a significant amount of operational resilience in the healthcare system through a division of labor and a transformational approach by using AI-driven technology.
- Better patient experience: The AI-driven automation solution allows the nurse to focus on the human aspect of caregiving by automating repetitive and routine activities. With the administrative duties taken care of and patient queries addressed quickly through chatbots, the traditional nurse can focus on the regular activities without having to shoulder the stress related to the nurse’s role.
Simply put
The emergence of the IA-assisted and data-driven virtual nurse position in healthcare is a transformative response to the growing pressures facing the industry, including chronic nurse shortages, high rates of burnout, and the increasing demand for efficient, high-quality patient care. Unlike the traditional nurse role, a virtual nurse provides remote patient care and support by leveraging technology. This new technology-assisted role does not replace the traditional nurse but rather complements and augments her capabilities, allowing for a more efficient and effective division of labor by segregating the low-acumen and high-acumen tasks that require human intervention.
