# IMProving Outcomes Related to Patients Through Advanced Nursing Technology (IMPORTANT)

> **NIH AHRQ R03** · HUNTER COLLEGE · 2021 · $51,444

## Abstract

Although healthcare costs in the United States rank among the highest in the world, critical health outcomes rank
lower than other high resource countries. In an effort to improve healthcare quality and concomitantly reduce
costs, Congress identified certain serious and expensive but preventable hospital acquired conditions such as
patient falls, pressure ulcer injuries (PUI) and hospital acquired infections (HAI), that would no longer be
reimbursed by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These preventable adverse events have been
linked with nursing time with patients. Nurses play a critical role in preventing adverse outcomes by quickly
identifying patients at risk, evaluating the extent of these risks, and acting upon the changing status of the patient,
a process termed “nurse surveillance.” Hence, nurses are key contributors to overall patient surveillance and
safety. The Joint Commission recommends that the nurses give report at the patient bedside, termed “bedside
shift report” (BSR), to reduce errors and improve continuity of care; hourly rounds (HR) are also recommended
to reduce falls; both of these measures contribute to nurse surveillance of patients, but their relationship to patient
outcomes remains understudied. NewYork-Presbyterian, a large academic health system, is piloting an
innovative technology called “iN,” to improve BSR and HR through the use of color-changing lights and integrated
mobile app to remind nurses when these activities have not been completed. This technology uses a combination
of mounted hardware in the patient room with obfuscated computer vision to provide constant surveillance of the
patient room and companion software supplied via a mobile phone app that integrates these technologies. This
novel intervention to increase BSR and HR by nurses, which generates detailed process data, offers an
unprecedented opportunity to gain a complete understanding of all activities that take place at the bedside and
yet has not yet been studied to characterize nurse surveillance or to assess associations with related patient
outcomes. The IMProving Outcomes Related to patients Through Advanced Nursing Technology (IMPORTANT)
study will characterize nurse surveillance and its influence on patient falls, HAI, and PUI to generate new
knowledge about factors that influence these nurse-sensitive patient outcomes. Using the dataset built in this
study that will integrate data from the iN device, electronic health record, staffing and census data, and hospital
reported quality measures on falls, HAI and PUIs, this prospective cohort study design will use descriptive
statistics and a Cox-proportional hazard model to characterize nurse surveillance and the contribution of BSR
and HR to nurse surveillance to generate predictive indicators of these nurse-sensitive outcomes (falls, PUIs
HAIs), which can be used to identify intervention targets. The IMPORTANT study addresses AHRQ’s specific
priorities to conduct “Research to impro...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10131779
- **Project number:** 5R03HS027006-02
- **Recipient organization:** HUNTER COLLEGE
- **Principal Investigator:** Carolyn J Sun
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** AHRQ
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $51,444
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-04-01 → 2023-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10131779

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10131779, IMProving Outcomes Related to Patients Through Advanced Nursing Technology (IMPORTANT) (5R03HS027006-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10131779. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*