Microsoft expands Dragon Copilot AI assistant for nurses

Diving brief:

• Microsoft is expanding its artificial intelligence-based clinical assistant to include features for nurses, the tech giant announced Thursday.
• Dragon Copilot, Microsoft’s enhanced AI assistance tool launching this spring, will be able to record nurses’ interactions with patients and help document their care, as well as access medical content or health system protocols, the company said.
• Microsoft worked with several health systems to create an update focused on nurses’ documentation flow. “Physicians document very differently,” said Mary Varghese Presti, vice president and chief operating officer at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences. “What we’ve built here for nurses is not a simple rinse and repeat of that. »

Dive overview:

Tech companies say AI assistants and documentation tools help clinicians manage a growing burden of administrative tasks — a long-term concern among providers who say the work distracts from patients and extends beyond business hours.

To this end, AI note-taking products have become a popular use case for integrating AI into healthcare delivery.

But the way many doctors document patient care in electronic health records — narratively outlining patient concerns and health information as well as next steps — might differ from the work of bedside nurses, given that they frequently enter and leave patient rooms and must enter data in separate fields, Presti said.

Thanks to Dragon Copilot, interactions between nurses and Patients are automatically categorized into a treatment regimen that nurses can review, Microsoft said. They can also pause while the assistant records to preview and check for accuracy. The review process serves as a safeguard to avoid mistakes, Presti said.

“The nurse decides: Do I want to change something? Do I want to add something?” she said. “So the nurse has the ability to take a look, review and then transfer to the EHR. »

Advocate Health, one of Microsoft’s health system partners, began testing the tool for nurses in April with 20 nurses on a hospital unit, before expand to more nurses, said Betty Jo Rocchio, chief nursing officer for the Charlotte, North Carolina-based health system. Advocate plans to expand the nursing assistant position to another hospital next month.

The AI ​​assistant provides faster documentation because nurses can complete their notes more quickly, she said. Additionally, it reduces the cognitive load on nurses and allows them to focus more directly on patients.

“It gives them more time at the bedside with patients building the relationship,” Rocchio said. “No one goes into nursing and says, ‘Wow, I hope I get my documents. I hope I can spend more time with this computer.””

The AI ​​tool for nurses will be generally available in the United States starting in December, a Microsoft spokesperson said. The tech giant is touting this product as the first commercially available ambient documentation product designed for nursing.

The update comes as Microsoft, which acquired documentation company Nuance Communications for nearly $20 billion about three years ago, has expanded its suite of software. AI documentation and clinical assistant products.

Also on Thursday, the tech giant announced it would allow third parties to develop applications and AI agents that integrate directly with Dragon Copilot, including for revenue cycle management, patient experience and virtual care.

For example, Microsoft said it is working with Wolters Kluwer’s OpenEvidence and UpToDate medical information platforms to offer clinical content within the product.