Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care and Tampa (Fla.) General Hospital are experiencing promising early results from an ambient AI tool for nurses.
The health systems are among the pilot sites for a new smartphone app from Microsoft and Epic that ambiently records patient encounters, drafts notes and fills in EHR fields for nurses.
At Stanford, 24 nurses are trialing DAX for nursing with a plan to move to 40 next month.
"Nurses are excited about the opportunity," Gretchen Brown, MSN, RN, vice president and chief nursing information officer of Stanford Health Care, told Becker's at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. "It's development, though. It's not a fully formed product, so you have to make sure you have a team of nurses that really understands that."
A Stanford nursing assistant has become one of the top creators and users in the nationwide pilot. "A nursing assistant goes down the floor and they're documenting volumes of what people ate and drank. They're emptying lines and drains. And we're seeing those numbers more quickly get into the chart. So they're doing these multiple different short sessions," Ms. Brown explained. "Where nurses want to go in and put the phone down and talk to the patient, talk about care, talk about your pain, your knee replacement, etc."
She said the staffers have been "invested" in "developing the country's roadmap" for AI in nursing.
Tampa General Hospital has 54 nurse and patient care technician users at a neuroscience med-surg unit.
"They're very engaged, and we really wanted to make sure we had that," Amit Patel, MSN, chief nursing informatics officer of Tampa General, told Becker's. "Because it's very new for the nurses to speak their assessments out loud. They're just not used to it."
A lot of nurses have been describing the visits into their phones outside the room after meeting with patients.
"My hope is they, one day, will transition back into the room and do it with the patient," Mr. Patel said. "Because it helps educate the patient, keeps them up to date and things like that while they're talking out loud."
Tampa General has also implemented flow sheet automation from Epic, creating a "double whammy" for documentation alongside ambient AI, Mr. Patel said. It's needed because the health system previously averaged a two-to-three-hour delay in documentation after an assessment.
"So many other things are reliant on documentation: EHR alerts, algorithms detecting sepsis," he explained. "So if that time is delayed, that's just delaying other things downstream. So that's where I'm hoping to really see value from some of this technology."
He hopes patient rooms eventually become ambient AI-enabled themselves, so nurses and other staffers can just walk in and start talking and an Alexa-like technology will pick up the conversation.
"We're giving direct feedback to Microsoft, so they've really made a lot of improvements to the product based on the feedback that the nurses are giving to them," Mr. Patel said. "Microsoft is consistently, with Epic, making improvements."