Flu Surges Break Routines: How Technology Supports Staff Under Strain

A few months ago, healthcare leaders breathed a cautious sigh of relief when early predictions suggested the 2025-2026 flu season wouldn’t be particularly severe. That optimism quickly faded. 

As of January 9th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates there have been 15 million flu cases, 180,000 hospitalizations, and 7,000 deaths in the U.S. so far this season—and we haven’t even hit the typical January-February peak yet. 

The strain is forcing difficult decisions, with some hospitals postponing elective procedures to preserve capacity and many emergency departments operating beyond their designed limits.

What makes this particularly challenging is that the dominant strain (influenza A H3N2 subclade K) emerged after this year’s vaccine was formulated. While the vaccine still offers important protection against severe illness, the mismatch means the virus can spread more rapidly through populations with reduced immunity.

Broken Routines and Compromised Care

When we think about flu surges, we often focus on the obvious challenges, such as overflowing emergency departments, exhausted staff, and limited bed capacity. But there’s another critical impact that receives less attention: the breakdown of the essential care routines that protect patient safety every single day.

Flu surges don’t just add patients to census numbers; they fundamentally disrupt the workflows and protocols that prevent falls, pressure injuries, healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), and patient deterioration. These disruptions happen not because nurses don’t care or because they’re not trying hard enough, but because the sheer volume of acutely ill patients makes it physically impossible to maintain normal routines.

Why Habits Break Under Pressure

As we explored in our article on behavior change in healthcare settings, establishing new clinical behaviors is difficult even under ideal conditions. Creating sustainable hand hygiene compliance, consistent rounding practices, or reliable documentation requires sustained effort, clear communication, visible leadership support, and systematic reinforcement over time.

But here’s what makes flu surges particularly dangerous: newly established routines are fragile. A two-week surge can quickly undo months of progress, and rebuilding those habits afterward is even harder than establishing them the first time.

When healthcare teams spend weeks or months building toward 80% hand hygiene compliance or establishing reliable hourly rounding patterns, a two-week surge can undo that progress. Staff revert to old workflows under cognitive load. New nurses who haven’t internalized the behaviors skip steps. And once the immediate crisis passes, organizations often find themselves starting from square one, minus the initial enthusiasm for another major behavior change initiative.

The traditional response—manual observation, staff education, and motivational campaigns—simply cannot scale to match the demands of a severe flu season. You can’t observe what you can’t see, and during surges, infection preventionists and nurse managers are too overwhelmed managing the crisis to conduct meaningful compliance monitoring.

How Technology Can Fill the Gap

This is where technology becomes particularly valuable as a support system that continues functioning when human capacity is exceeded.

Maintaining Hand Hygiene Accountability

Flu surges create the perfect storm for infection transmission: high patient volumes, frequent staff-patient interactions, cognitive overload, and time pressure. It’s exactly when hand hygiene compliance tends to drop and exactly when the consequences are most severe.

Electronic monitoring systems can continue capturing compliance data even when manual observation becomes impossible. When the surge subsides and teams can refocus on improvement, comprehensive data reveals exactly what happened during the crisis, which units were most affected, and where targeted interventions will have the greatest impact.

Real-time feedback at the point of care also helps maintain accountability even when supervisors are occupied elsewhere. This sustained visibility can help prevent the complete collapse of compliance that often accompanies surge periods.

Understanding What’s Happening on the Unit

During normal operations, most facilities maintain relatively consistent patient care routines. But flu surges fundamentally alter the equation, dramatically increasing both patient acuity and total patient load simultaneously.

Real-time monitoring of nursing activities provides visibility into what’s actually happening on the unit:

• Missed rounds become immediately visible rather than discovered retrospectively through incident reports
• Delayed response times are flagged as they occur, enabling proactive redistribution of resources
• Units under sustained strain can be identified before adverse events occur

Digital rounding monitors can give care teams a live, unit-wide view of patient rounding activity. Color-coded displays showing which rooms have gone the longest without staff visits make it easier for nurses to prioritize patients who need attention next—especially valuable during chaotic shifts when it’s easy to lose track.

For nursing leaders, this data enables strategic intervention: identifying when specific units need additional support before fall rates increase, understanding which shifts or days show the most significant gaps, and recognizing early signs of nurse burnout through sustained workload patterns.

Locating Equipment Under Pressure

Flu surges don’t just increase patient volume—they dramatically increase demand for specific equipment. IV pumps, respiratory equipment, vital sign monitors, and isolation supplies all see usage rates spike simultaneously.

In normal times, equipment can be somewhat scattered across units. During a surge, that scattered distribution becomes a critical bottleneck. Nurses waste precious minutes searching for available IV pumps while managing multiple high-acuity patients.

Asset tracking systems provide instant visibility into equipment location and availability. Staff can locate needed equipment immediately rather than searching. Facilities can see exactly how many devices are available during peak usage periods, avoiding unnecessary emergency equipment rentals while ensuring genuine needs are met. And critically, staff time shifts from searching for assets to delivering patient care.

Protecting Gains During the Storm

Healthcare organizations invest tremendous resources in building better processes, establishing reliable protocols, and creating cultures of safety. Flu surges threaten to erode those investments overnight.

The facilities that emerge from surges with their safety culture intact aren’t necessarily those with the lowest patient volumes or the highest staffing ratios. They’re the ones with systems that continue working when human capacity is exceeded—technology that captures what would otherwise be lost, surfaces what would otherwise be invisible, and maintains accountability when everything else is in flux.

No technology can add hours to the day or reduce patient acuity. But thoughtfully implemented systems can prevent the complete breakdown of safety routines, provide leaders with the visibility needed for strategic intervention, and preserve the behavior change gains that took months to establish.

As flu season continues to intensify across the country, healthcare leaders face a choice: hope that established routines somehow survive unprecedented strain, or deploy systems specifically designed to support those routines when pressure is highest.

The difference between those approaches may well determine which facilities emerge from this flu season with their safety culture strengthened rather than shattered.