MD Anderson Cancer Center and virtual nursing | HIMSS 2025
Lavonia Thomas of MD Anderson talks about the program’s growth, encouraging early results, and advice for others looking at virtual nursing.
Las Vegas - The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center is operating a virtual nursing program to help patients navigate their hospital stay, and also offer some assistance to nurses working on the floor with patients.
Lavonia Thomas, nursing informatics officer at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® at the HIMSS Conference about the virtual nursing program, its growth, and some promising results. She also offered advice for other hospitals looking at virtual nursing. Here’s a portion of our conversation.
Q: Can you talk about the virtual nursing program at MD Anderson Cancer Center?
A: “So our virtual nursing program launched in April of 2023. We started out with one demonstration unit, and we worked one workflow, which was the admissions of patients. Since then, we have spanned across our entire medical and surgical cohort of units, and we've introduced virtual nursing into our emergency room for patient admission workup.
“We started with five nurses. We are now at 16 virtual nurses, all with a tremendous amount of oncology nursing experience from MD Anderson. We are continuing to scale this effort. We will be moving into our hematology units, and we're also having some discussions with our ambulatory treatment center to adopt some workflows in that area.”
Q: And you're encouraged by the results you're seeing so far with virtual nursing?
A: “Extremely encouraged. Our feedback from our frontline nurses has been extremely positive. We have utilized their feedback to continue to augment our workflows and make any changes that we need to and our patient feedback, as we have talked to them anecdotally, has been extremely positive about their interaction with the virtual nurses.”
Q: What advice would you offer other hospitals looking at virtual nursing?
A: “There are opportunities to improve the efficiency and to support our nurses at the front line. I would advise anyone not to allow a lack of technology or what they see as a lack of resources to hold them back from looking at what could be done around this virtual space. Many organizations have been very creative about introducing virtual nurses to that work space, and I would encourage folks to start where you are at.”
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