From Bedside Nurse and Etiometry User to Advocate and Etiometry Employee

A calling to care for others turned into a career in the medical software industry for Kerry Gambon, RN, BSN, CCRN. While her day-to-day job responsibilities varied greatly, one thing has stayed the same – prioritizing patient care.

Destined to Help Others

Since experiencing the traumatic loss of a close family member in high school, Kerry knew she wanted to focus her career on helping people and being there for others during difficult times. Following in her family members’ footsteps, she decided to pursue the medical field and go to nursing school.

During this time, Kerry was drawn to the fast-paced nature of intensive care. She enjoyed making a direct and positive impact on the sickest and most vulnerable patients. After graduation, Kerry started working in a pediatric medical surgical ICU. For Kerry, choosing to work with children was an easy decision; she knew every young patient she cared for was going through something that they shouldn’t have to experience at that stage of life. Kerry was helping her patients and their families through the toughest of times.

Experiencing Bedside Burnout

After a few years working as a pediatric ICU nurse, partly during a pandemic, Kerry started to experience emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion due to the highly stressful ICU environment. Unfortunately, this state of burnout is very common among critical care nurses. When surveyed, more than a quarter of critical care nurses reported symptoms of severe burnout syndrome and 86% reported at least one symptom of burnout.¹

Kerry began to realize her journey as a nurse was very different than she had envisioned. After a lot of consideration, she made the very difficult and personal decision to leave the bedside. Kerry started exploring alternate career options away from direct patient care that would still help people and make an impact on clinicians and patients.

With a bit of luck, Kerry found an opportunity at Etiometry, the company that provided the data aggregation and visualization platform that she knew intimately from daily use in the ICU.

Empowering Nurses at the Bedside

It’s common for members of the interdisciplinary team to have different opinions about what their patient might need. It is the responsibility of the bedside nurse to capture innumerous data points and accurately relay them to the rest of the team. However, even when patient information is charted meticulously, it’s nearly impossible to capture every data point, sometimes leaving the care team with unanswered questions.

To reinforce effective communication between members of the care team, Kerry emphasized the importance of having easy access to valuable data. When equipped with the right information, bedside nurses can get their point across without omitting pertinent data points and ultimately advocate for the patient. In these instances, Kerry would rely on the Etiometry platform.

The Etiometry platform uses data aggregation and visualization software to capture and visualize patients’ physiologic data and track their clinical course. The software continuously trends high-fidelity data from disparate clinical systems and displays a holistic view of a patient’s clinical status on an easy-to-interpret screen. The Etiometry platform helps break down the silos between doctors and bedside nurses by providing critical insights that inform decision-making and help unify both parties on a course of action.

The Etiometry platform made a huge difference for Kerry when caring for patients at the bedside. Kerry always prioritized spending time with patients and their loved ones; however, she had endless other responsibilities. She explained that the Etiometry platform acted as her mental notepad throughout the day – providing all the context that gets lost during the midst of doing multiple tasks simultaneously. The platform also helped her chart more quickly in-between patient care.

Access to the right information at the right time helped shorten belabored conversations and streamlined communication between the care team, resulting in more time to spend on other responsibilities. Kerry explained that any second or minute you can give back to the care team is the most important thing you can do.

A New Type of Advocate

After observing the Etiometry platform make a difference for patients and clinicians in the ICU, Kerry knew that joining Etiometry was the right career move. In her role as a Clinical Specialist at Etiometry, Kerry has a completely different set of responsibilities, but most importantly, she gets to be an advocate for a product that she truly believes helps nurses provide the best care for their patients. Kerry’s new role is still dynamic – some days, she joins sales calls to have genuine conversations with fellow nurses that are considering implementing the Etiometry platform; other days, she is on-site with customers in the ICU helping make Etiometry a more fluid part of their workflow; and she provides input to her Etiometry colleagues who are developing Clinical Management Applications (Clinical MAPs).

Kerry was originally drawn to nursing to take care of people. Now at Etiometry, she has the opportunity to help people in an entirely new way. By providing nurses with the technology to track patient data, coordinate care, and get time back in their day, Kerry is undoubtedly still helping to improve the quality of patient care.

1. https://www.aacn.org/newsroom/burnout-in-critical-care