Dive Transient:
- Microsoft is increasing its synthetic intelligence-backed medical assistant to incorporate performance geared in direction of nurses, the expertise large mentioned Thursday.
- Dragon Copilot, Microsoft’s upgraded AI assistant instrument launched this spring, will have the ability to report nurses’ interactions with sufferers and assist doc their care, in addition to entry medical content material or well being system protocols, the corporate mentioned.
- Microsoft collaborated with a number of well being programs to construct the replace targeted on nurses’ documentation workflow. “Physicians doc very otherwise,” mentioned Mary Varghese Presti, company vp and chief working officer at Microsoft Well being and Life Sciences. “What we constructed right here for nurses just isn’t a rinse and repeat of that.”
Dive Perception:
Expertise companies say AI assistants and documentation instruments assist clinicians handle an rising burden of administrative duties — a long-term concern amongst suppliers who say the work distracts from sufferers and drags into off-hours.
To that finish, AI notetaking merchandise have turn into a well-liked use case for integrating AI into healthcare supply.
However the way in which many physicians doc affected person care in digital well being information — narratively laying out affected person issues and well being info together with subsequent steps — might differ from bedside nurses’ work, given they ceaselessly come out and in of sufferers’ rooms and must enter information into discrete fields, Presti mentioned.
Permission granted by Microsoft
Utilizing Dragon Copilot, interactions between nurses and sufferers are routinely organized into flowsheet documentation for nurses to overview, Microsoft mentioned. They will additionally pause whereas the assistant is recording to preview and examine for accuracy. The overview course of serves as a guardrail to forestall errors, Presti mentioned.
“The nurse decides, do I need to edit one thing? Do I need to append one thing?” she mentioned. “So there’s a possibility for the nurse to have a look, overview after which hit switch to the EHR.”
Advocate Well being, considered one of Microsoft’s well being system companions, started piloting the nurse instrument in April with 20 nurses on one hospital unit, earlier than increasing to extra nurses, mentioned Betty Jo Rocchio, chief nurse govt on the Charlotte, North Carolina-based well being system. Advocate plans to broaden the nurse assistant to a different hospital subsequent month.
The AI assistant supplies extra well timed documentation, as nurses can extra rapidly full notes, she mentioned. Plus, it lessens the cognitive load on nurses and permits them to focus extra instantly on sufferers.
“It provides them extra time on the bedside with sufferers forming the connection,” Rocchio mentioned. “No person goes into nursing saying, ‘Wow, I hope I get my documentation. I hope I can spend extra time with this pc.’”
The AI instrument for nurses shall be typically accessible within the U.S. beginning in December, a Microsoft spokesperson mentioned. The expertise large is billing the product as the primary commercially accessible ambient documentation product constructed for nursing.
The replace comes as Microsoft, which acquired documentation agency Nuance Communications for practically $20 billion about three years in the past, has been increasing its suite of AI documentation and medical assistant merchandise.
Additionally on Thursday, the expertise large introduced it can permit third events to develop apps and AI brokers that combine instantly with Dragon Copilot, together with for income cycle administration, affected person expertise and digital care.
For instance, Microsoft mentioned it’s working with medical info platforms OpenEvidence and Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate to supply medical content material throughout the product.
