Mercy Advances AI Tool for Nursing Through Collaboration with Microsoft Dragon Copilot
Mercy, one of the largest heathcare systems in the country, is transforming nursing care through a collaboration with Microsoft toward the development of an ambient voice artificial intelligence solution for nurses within Microsoft Dragon Copilot.
With the consent of patients, Dragon Copilot uses ambient AI to document nursing observations from conversations between patients and caregivers and automatically feeds them into patients' electronic health records. This new tool is already being used in inpatient units at Mercy hospitals in St. Louis and Springfield, Mo.,and Fort Smith, Ark., with more Mercy locations expected to adopt it later this year.
Mercy is one of eight U.S. healthcare systems working with Microsoft and front-line nurses to shape this technology.There, medical-surgical nurses participated in the Dragon Copilot development, where they narrated their care in real time to help test and improve the system.
The goal of the ambient nursing capabilities within Dragon Copilot is to ease burdens related to staffing shortages, heavy documentation demands, and constant multitasking, not add more technology, said Cheryl Denison, clinical integration director in Mercy's Office of Transformation.
"We're seeing firsthand how Dragon Copilot is transforming the environment of care while also directly supporting nursing practice," Denison said. "By enabling nurses to document care more naturally through speech, ambient voice technology reduces cognitive load while also enabling them to do more of what they became a nurse to do in the first place: care for patients, interacting and engaging with them to an even greater degree."
Dragon Copilotimproves workflow and nursing practice through the following:
- Streamlined Documentation-- Nurses audibly narrate care to be captured and transformed into flow sheet documentation, which they can review, edit, and file into the electronic health record.
- Clinical Insight Access -- Nurses can retrieve trusted medical content within the workflow.
- Task Automation -- AI helps draft notes and summarize patient interactions, reducing clicks and speeding up documentation.
This technology is shaped by real feedback from nurses at Mercy and other health systems. Their input guided every step of development, with a focus on reducing clicks, improving collaboration and giving nurses more time with patients.
The solution, with ambient AI capabilities, is designed to support nurses by giving them more time to focus on their patients. Stephanie Whitaker, chief nursing officer at Mercy Hospital Fort Smith, said the tool has made a noticeable difference in how nurses spend their time.
"Many of our nurses have said that by narrating as they provide care, which is pulled into the electronic medical record, they're noticing their documentation is much more robust. We cannot wait to roll it out across all of Mercy," Whitaker said.
Mercy metrics provided by Microsoft show the following:
- 21 percent reduction in documentation latency.
- 65 percent improvement in perceived timeliness.
- 8-24 minutes saved per shift for high-use nurses,
- 29 percent reduction in incremental overtime.
- 300 percent increase in mobile platform use.
- 4.5 percent increase in patient satisfaction
"Partnering with Mercy to develop the ambient AI solution for nursing workflows in Microsoft Dragon Copilot has been an incredible journey," said Umesh Rustogi, general manager of Dragon and Platform, Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft, in a statement. "The real-time feedback from both the front-line nurses as well as the nursing informatics team at Mercy was really valuable in shaping this technology around real-world needs, delivering innovation that reduces administrative burden and giving nurses more time for bedside care."