METI Nurse Residency Program for reducing health care costs

METI, the Sarasota-based manufacturer of medical simulation products and educational software, today announced that it has begun rolling out its groundbreaking, experiential-based Nurse Residency Program at the first of many health care organizations throughout North America. Initially developed in partnership with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the Nurse Residency Program offers health care organizations significant savings in on boarding costs of new nurses by helping reduce turnover and vacancy rates.

Plans to implement the METI Nurse Residency Program are currently underway at a number of leading hospitals including Providence Health Care System in Alaska, Dayton VA Medical Center in Ohio, Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida, the Health and Hospitals Corporation in New York and Ephrata Community Hospital in Pennsylvania.

"Nursing shortages and rapidly increasing costs are very apparent at every level of health care," said Lou Oberndorf, Chairman and CEO of METI. "The Nurse Residency Program is designed to provide the industry with highly effective, advanced educational tools to help address some of these challenges and realize some very real savings."

The program integrates human patient simulation and other innovative approaches into the traditional didactic nursing orientation. What Dartmouth-Hitchcock and METI were able to prove, in a three year study of the program, was that the approach not only successfully reduced time and costs of orientation, but increased the ability to recruit new nurses and increased retention rates, overall productivity and efficacy -- potentially enabling hospitals to save millions of dollars in training costs.