About This Session
As health systems face increasing complexity across care settings, technology plays a critical role in advancing both patient and team member safety. This session explores how targeted, high-impact technology solutions can be leveraged to measurably reduce safety risks while strengthening frontline confidence and operational reliability. Attendees will examine real-world examples of technology automation, including Remote Visual Monitoring, to understand how these tools support frontline caregivers, enhance remote patient care, and mitigate inpatient safety risks. The presentation will also look ahead to the near future, highlighting how AI enablement is expected to transform patient and workforce safety through new capabilities, while also addressing emerging risks and the importance of responsible, thoughtful adoption in clinical operations.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the presentation, the attendees will be able to:
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Identify at least two specific, high-impact technology opportunities that health systems can implement to measurably improve patient safety and team member safety across care settings.
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Explain one real-world use case of technology automation (Remote Visual Monitoring) and describe how it supports frontline team members, enhances confidence in remote patient care, and reduces safety risk in inpatient environments.
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Describe at least three ways AI enablement is expected to impact patient and team member safety in the near future, including anticipated benefits, emerging risks, and key considerations for responsible adoption in clinical operations.
Speakers
Marguerite Cunningham, DNP, NEA-BC, NI-BC
VP, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, VP of Nursing, Medicine Service Line, Inova Center for Personalized Health
Marguerite Cunningham, DNP, NEA-BC, NI-BC, Vice President, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, and Vice President of Nursing for the Medicine Service Line at Inova Health System. She provides executive leadership in nursing informatics and clinical transformation, guiding multidisciplinary teams to strategically optimize the electronic health record to improve care delivery, patient outcomes, and operational efficiency. She is board-certified as a Nurse Executive–Advanced (NEA BC) and in Nursing Informatics (NI BC).
From 2024 to 2025, Dr. Cunningham was selected as one of 20 national fellows in the Johnson & Johnson Nurse Innovation Fellowship powered by Penn Nursing and the Wharton School. As part of the fellowship, she developed a prototype for a real-time staffing collaboration platform that enables nurse leaders across a five-hospital system to coordinate staffing decisions virtually and at scale.
Since 2022, Dr. Cunningham has led multiple large-scale improvement initiatives engaging more than 450 frontline team members. These efforts accelerated reductions in documentation burden, improvements in medication administration safety, development of digital tools for nurse education, and advancement of virtual nursing, acute care redesign, and remote cardiac monitoring standardization. She holds degrees from Villanova University, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, and an executive certificate in Health IT leadership from the University of Colorado.
Judy Dooley, DNP, RN, NE-BC, CNML
Director of Centralized Monitoring
High Reliability Operation Center, Inova Center for Personalized Health
Judy Dooley, DNP, RN, NE-BC, CNML, Director of Virtual Patient Safety Associates and Centralized Cardiac Monitoring, has over 30 years of experience as a Registered Nurse and has dedicated her career to advancing patient safety. Dr. Dooley’s work focuses on ensuring the appropriate integration of technology, education, and team engagement to support safe, high-quality care.
Dr. Dooley’s DNP dissertation centered on how nursing assessment, combined with virtual platforms such as Remote Visual Monitoring (RVM), can enhance and sustain patient safety. In today’s healthcare environment, leveraging technology to support frontline teams is essential to keeping our patients, families, and communities safe.
Ilona Edwards, MSN, NI-BC, CSSGB
Senior Director, Virtual Care, Nursing Informatics, Virtual Nursing, Remote Visual Monitoring, Central Monitoring Center, Inova Center for Personalized Health
Ilona Edwards, MSN, NI-BC, CSSGB, Senior Director, Virtual Care Nursing Informatics, is a longtime bedside nurse with 25 years of experience in the neonatal intensive care unit as a staff nurse, educator, and director. While there, Ms. Edwards learned the value of technology to benefit workflow and efficiency while freeing me up to spend more time with patients and their families. In 2016, Ilona found her niche working in the informatics world, where she could marry the expertise gained from the bedside with my passion for innovation and technology. Over the subsequent years, Ilona evolved from working with the analytics team and understanding the power of data to now working with nursing informatics to support virtual nursing, remote visual monitoring, and cardiac telemetry monitoring.
