For the roughly 10 nursing executives attending the Mastermind event this week in Atlanta, the path to transformation begins with the nurse, who is most often closest to the patient, and any meaningful change that reduces waste and cost and boosts outcomes has to focus on improving the patient’s healthcare journey.

The challenge, then, is figuring out how a nurse should fit into the patient’s care journey, and how today’s healthcare ecosystem gets that wrong. Beginning with inpatient care, from the ED to the hospital room, nurses are currently called on to do many things they really don’t have to do. Technology like AI can take on those tasks and give nurses back the time they need and want to care for patients.

That new nursing workflow, Mastermind participants said, should be part of a much larger reinvention of the care team.

Indeed, a growing number of health systems don’t even want to call the platform virtual nursing, and are instead focusing on care coordination and management, a strategy that pulls in all the members of the care team, from clinicians to specialists to pharmacists to technicians.

In that model, technology becomes the foundation upon which each member of the care team can do the tasks they were meant to do—clinicians providing care to patients, and others providing support or handling education and administrative duties. A virtual care platform would then be more like a call center, handling incoming requests and directing them to the right care team member.

According to the Mastermind participants, as healthcare leaders develop the hospital of the future, that virtual care platform will extend outside the hospital, coordinating services that extend to other healthcare sites, even the home. But this platform will only work if the technology sits in the background, gathering and assessing data and handling the tasks that would normally put nurses and other care team members in front of computers instead of patients.