Mercy Advances AI Nursing Tool, Collaborates With Microsoft

Nurses at Mercy Hospital Fort Smith are among the tool's first collaborators. (Provided)

The Mercy health care system is collaborating with Microsoft to help develop the first commercially available ambient AI solution for nurses within Microsoft Dragon Copilot.

Ambient AI operates in the background and is designed to adapt to and recognize human interactions in everyday settings. With the consent of patients, Dragon Copilot uses ambient AI to document nursing observations from conversations between a patient and caregiver which automatically feed into the patient’s electronic health record.

The new tool is already being used in inpatient units at Mercy Hospital Fort Smith as well as Mercy hospitals in St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri, with more Mercy locations, including Mercy Northwest Arkansas, expected to adopt it in the coming months.

Mercy is one of eight health systems across the country working closely with Microsoft and frontline nurses to shape the technology. At Mercy, medical-surgical nurses, including many in Fort Smith, participated in the Dragon Copilot development, where they narrated their care in real time to help test and improve the system.

According to a press release from Mercy, nurses face growing challenges every day, including staffing shortages, heavy documentation demands and constant multitasking.

The goal of the ambient nursing capabilities within Dragon Copilot is to ease those burdens, not add more technology, Cheryl Denison, clinical integration director with Mercy’s Office of Transformation, said in the release.

“We’re seeing firsthand how Dragon Copilot is transforming the environment of care while also directly supporting nursing practice,” Denison said in the release. “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.”

With the World Health Organization projecting a global nursing shortage of 4.5 million by 2030, tools like Dragon Copilot could play a key role in supporting nurse retention and job satisfaction. The release stated that recent surveys show that 65% of nurses report high levels of stress and burnout, while more than 25% of their shift is consumed by documentation and administrative tasks. Dragon Copilot addresses these issues by improving workflow and nursing practice through:

• Streamlined documentation: Nurses audibly narrate care to be captured and transformed into flow sheet documentation, which they can review, edit and seamlessly file into the electronic health record.
• Clinical insight access: Nurses can retrieve trusted medical content within the workflow, reducing time spent navigating multiple systems.
• Task automation: AI helps draft notes and summarize patient interactions, reducing clicks and speeding up documentation.

The technology is shaped by real feedback from nurses at Mercy and other health systems. Stephanie Whitaker, chief nursing officer at Mercy Hospital Fort Smith, said in the release that 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:

• 21% reduction in documentation latency
• 65% improvement in perceived timeliness
• 8-24 minutes saved per shift for high-use nurses
• 29% reduction in incremental overtime
• 300% increase in mobile platform use
• 4.5% 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,” Umesh Rustogi, general manager with Dragon and Platform, Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft, said in the press release. “The real-time feedback from both the frontline 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.”