In this Club Nurse podcast episode, host Colton Lord welcomes listeners, promotes a giveaway, and references the previous interview with Stephanie Beggs. He then covers four main news stories: (1) an Atlanta clinic incident where a wheelchair‑bound multiple sclerosis patient was left alone on a table after falling asleep, highlighting the need for closing‑shift checks; (2) a Colorado jury award of $20 million to registered nurse Dawn Quinick Joppy for racial discrimination and wrongful termination after manslaughter charges were dropped, detailing the alleged systemic bias she faced; (3) a California resident who tested positive for plague after a likely flea bite while camping near South Lake Tahoe, reminding listeners of zoonotic risks; and (4) Epic’s rollout of three AI assistants—Emmy for patients, ART for clinicians, and Penny for revenue‑cycle tasks—explaining their functions and expressing a nurse‑centric desire for AI documentation tools. The episode ends with calls to follow the show, visit nurse.org for news, and a sign‑off encouraging self‑care.
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Welcome to Club Nurse. I'm Colton Lord, your host.
By you being here today, it shows me that you are someone who wants to learn, grow, laugh, connect, and just let your emotions flow. We are here to share real stories and hear real life experiences from real people. You are not alone in this, and Club Nurse is here to show you that. Don't forget to follow the show and share today's episode with someone you love. Now let's dive into today's conversation.
Hello everybody. Welcome back to Club Nurse. This is Colton Lord, and today we are diving into more nurse news. We've got some interesting things to cover and talk about today that are happening in the world of healthcare, in the world of nursing. First off, wanted to remind you to follow the show, subscribe to the show. We are currently running a giveaway. If you go onto Apple Podcasts, you rate the show, leave a review, Be sure to follow the podcast on Instagram @club.nurse and make sure you fill out the link on the nurse.org webpage and you can be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card. So if you go to nurse.org/clubnurse, you can scroll down to the bottom and there is a place for you to enter your information to win one of our $50 gift cards for Amazon. We'll be giving them away, super excited. And yeah, if you did not listen to last week's episode, With author and CEO Stephanie Beggs. I highly recommend that you go check that out. Her new book, Debrief, recently came out and is available really anywhere that you get books. And it's a great read. I highly recommend that you go read her book and also listen to our episode last week. We dive into what it's like being a new nurse during the COVID pandemic and how Stephanie launched into the stratosphere. Creating her own company and being the CEO of RN Explained, which really provides amazing resources to nurses. Super awesome. We love nurses who are blazing trails in the profession, and Stephanie is a prime example. She gets very vulnerable with the audience and just leaves it all out on the table. So I highly recommend you listening to the episode with Stephanie. And now let's dive into some nurse news for the week. So this first story is wild. This comes out of Atlanta, where a patient with multiple sclerosis was left on a table in a clinic and there was no staff there. Yeah, so Ankita Matkin— I apologize if I'm saying the name incorrectly— went to her 2 o'clock appointment at the Hangar Clinic in Buckhead on Thursday, August 21st, to be fitted for foot braces. And while she was there, she had noted that her door was open, people were kind of passing back and forth, nobody was coming in to address her. And so basically she fell asleep, and when she woke up and nobody was there, it was silent, the clinic was Empty, and her phone was dead. Mind you, she has MS, she's wheelchair-bound, so she had to roll herself off the clinic table and get herself to an outlet to charge her phone, where she was then able to call 911 and FaceTime her daughters, who were finally able to come and help her. This is crazy, and anybody out there working in a clinic, this is a huge reminder. Be sure you go through and check, uh, everything to make sure nobody is being left behind. I remember when I used to work as a lifeguard, even at a pool, that was like one of our closing protocols. You have to go through and make sure there's nobody passed out in the locker rooms or somewhere random on the premises because these things do happen. And I think, I mean, at the hospital we don't really think about this necessarily because there is no closing shift. So this doesn't really happen there. I mean, I guess I do remember there was times when I worked on the inpatient units where we would close down a unit if the census was low or staffing was low and we would have to move patients around. So always Reminder, if you're closing anything down, just go back and do maybe a double check. Thankfully, it sounds like this patient was okay, but just, you know, was humiliated, didn't have access to a bathroom. It's obviously very traumatizing being left somewhere and feeling that kind of feeling stranded. And if you're disabled, not able to walk, move around, that's very scary. But I'm glad that everything was okay in the end. So this actually came out last week where the jury awarded nurse— and please forgive me when I say names Please forgive me. Some of these names are really hard to pronounce, and I just want to—I would love to make sure I'm saying these correctly. But jury awards nurse Don Quinick Joppy twenty million dollars for discrimination lawsuit. Slay queen! This story is insane. This comes out of Colorado, where this nurse at the Medical Center of Aurora in Colorado, last name Joppy, really came in first into public view in November 2020 when she was faced with manslaughter charges following an incident involving end-of-life care. The Charges for manslaughter on Joppy were dropped in September of 2021 after it was determined that she had followed doctor's verbal orders and that the patient's death was due to natural causes. Despite this, though, Joppy was terminated from her position and her reputation was tarnished. And as you read through this, I highly recommend you go to nurse.org/news, find this article and read through it, because what Joppy is saying, that the staff and the charge nurses, the way they were treating her, and HR all the way up to management is diabolical, should never happen. And I am so glad that she came out on top on this, on this case, because imagine the trauma that she had to go through. And this, this is not like this happened last week. This has been ongoing for the last 5 years, and I'm really glad that there was justice for this nurse as she deserved it. So the lawsuit was initiated by Dawn Quinnick Joppy, a registered nurse who worked in the critical care trauma unit at the Medical Center of Aurora. Joppy stated that from 2017 to 2019, she faced Intended to marginalize, segregate, and undermine her based on stereotypical and harmful views of Black professionals. After her first year at the Medical Center of Aurora, things reportedly began to change for Dawn Quinick. She says that she was treated differently from her white coworkers. She said that she was not allowed to grow or advance in her career at the facility due to racial discrimination. According to the records, when she applied for an opportunity to train to work with cardiac patients, she was told by the charge nurse it required much deeper clinical experience. Critical thinking and much better organizational skills. It also was reported that she was falsely accused of stealing a white patient's credit card and purchasing a stethoscope. She was restricted to one area of the ICU. This is insane, literally diabolical insane, and was not allowed to go into the main break room or locker room with her coworkers. This was allegedly done without an investigation and was thanked by human resources for quote not making a big fuss over it. Oh my gosh, girl, I'm so glad that she got out of there, and I'm so glad that she's being reimbursed and paid for this because this is reckless. This is, this is tarnishing her reputation. This is affecting her getting jobs anywhere else. These manslaughter charges that she had, imagine even though they were dropped, trying to get out of there, go get a job somewhere else. This is some serious stuff. Uh, so I'm so glad that there was justice for Joppy. Slay queen. Uh-oh, let's talk about this one real quick. A California resident tests positive for the plague after camping near Lake Tahoe. Uh, this comes after, remember, if you If you remember us talking about earlier, a few weeks ago, northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona, there was a reported case of the plague where the patient did die. This California resident does report being likely bitten by a was it a flea? Yes, a person tested positive for the plague after possibly being bitten by an infected flea while camping in South Lake Tahoe. So be careful out there. I don't need to go through this whole thing with the plague. We know how scary it is. Be careful out there. These things can travel in your dogs, get into your home. If you have the symptoms. Girl, go get looked at. Okay, we talked about all the symptoms in one of our other episodes, talking all about the plague and how it happened in Northern Arizona. So check that out if you're interested in knowing more about the symptoms of the plague. All right, let's talk about Epic. It's battle. It's the battle of Epic versus Cerner. I'm just kidding. We all know Epic is much more superior to using Cerner. Although I learned on Cerner, and I think it's actually from what I read was bought or is now being called something else. Oracle Health, formerly known as Cerner. I didn't know that. I didn't mind it, but I didn't know anything other. Than Epic before. But let's talk about Epic, of course, utilizing AI and some updates that they have that was just announced at the company's annual meeting. And it's actually not just for doctors. This is actually going to be some really cool advancements that patients can also use. I know a lot of people out there are familiar with MyChart, which is Epic's portal for patients to use. I know that I have a MyChart when I go to my provider. So Epic partners with Microsoft and they are making some pretty cool advancements. Let's talk So they're calling one of their new features Emmy, which is an assistant that the company says will be able to answer questions about lab results, propose appointment times, and suggest relevant screenings that patients can discuss with their doctor, which is super cool. You know, it's confusing, especially if you're non-medical, to get on there. You're not really sure how to interpret all these things. You have to Google it. You don't know if what you're reading is really accurate. So to have an AI tool on there to kind of help you decipher what is this, help you to determine interpret what you're being given as far as your lab results and things like that is a super cool tool. Also decreases the patients having to call into the clinic, taking away time from the staff that is working. Okay, so the ART assistant is intended for clinicians and is meant to act as an active AI digital colleague. The company said ART will be able to anticipate information that a doctor might need, for instance, and can pull up information like blood pressure trends, update a patient's family history, and place orders. Epic also said that ART will be able To draft clinical notes. This is huge. Okay, when are we going to have the AI for the nurses to document? Okay, the doctors already have their Dragon system. They're the providers. They can speak into yada la la la la la la, and then it comes out into their note. Okay, they already have their dictation. Where is the nurses that we can just say, "Hi, my name is Colton, a registered nurse. I went into the patient's room. The patient started hitting me and calling me very aggressive slurs. So I asked them if they wanted ginger ale and a turkey sandwich, and they said." Yes, and everything was okay after that, period. Where is our— like, where's our system to put all that into our documentation? I know, I know. Okay. Epic's Penny Assistant is designed to help with revenue cycle management and other administrative needs, such as generating appeal letters for insurance claims that get denied. It can also help speed up medical coding by serving up suggestions. These 2 features are already live. That is, you know, that's cool. Shout out to Epic. Shout out to Microsoft. If you can just make our lives easier, I'm all for it. Like, make the documentation easier, make it take less time for us. Although you already know, the easier they make it for us, the more they're gonna require us to chart because of course we can't have any free time or time with our patients at the bedside. But either way, less time charting, I'm all here for it. So thank you, Epic. I'm excited to see these updates as they roll out. All right. And that's it on this week's nurse news. Make sure you're following the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or coming back to nurse.org/news. Club Nurse to catch all the episodes. Uh, we are embedding a lot of these episodes into the articles themselves so that you have access to them. Uh, if you wanna stay most up to date on the news, make sure you go to nurse.org/news, and that is where you can find all the articles that you can read through that has the most up to date breaking news for nurses and for healthcare. So with that, I appreciate you guys being here with me today, and we will see you next time. Bye. Bye. From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to thank you for being here at Club Nurse.
I hope you gained something valuable from today's episode, and if you did, remember to share this episode with someone that you love. Follow me on socials at Nurse Daddies or Colton Lord 17, and be sure to follow nurse.org to stay informed with all of the hottest healthcare topics. Until next time, take care of yourself the way you take care of everyone else.
