Epic is working on multiple pilots with health systems and vendors to bring a popular artificial intelligence tool to nurses.
The electronic health record company is partnering with Microsoft and ambient AI vendor Abridge to try to improve nursing workflows and reduce the documentation burden.
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Epic's growing interest in offering nursing technology reflects a broader industry trend. Nurses have seen a marked uptick in pitches from vendors selling technology focused on tasks ranging from easing documentation and other administrative tasks to predicting which patients have a higher risk of falling.
Return on investment of the technologies, variations of which already have been rolled out to physicians, remains uncertain. Also unclear is when such tools would be broadly available.
“Generative AI, and in particular ambient generative AI, has offered us a whole new set of tools and opportunities to really reinvent how we are working as nurses,” said Emily Barey, vice president of nursing at Epic. “I think it is bigger than documentation burden reduction.”
Nurses are testing Epic's Rover mobile app to record conversations through a smartphone. The AI tool puts relevant portions of a conversation into the EHR, such as a patient’s pain scores. A nurse then reviews the data in the Rover app and files it to the chart.
Variations of the technology are being tested with Microsoft at nine health systems including Jacksonville, Florida-based Baptist Health, St. Louis-based Mercy Health and Palo Alto, California-based Stanford Health Care. In February, Epic also partnered with Abridge and Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic.
The strategy closely resembles Epic's blueprint for working with vendors in other technology areas, by partnering with a limited number of vendors at first and expanding over time.
“We're designing the Epic workflow in a way that can benefit [nurses] regardless of which ambient technology is your input mechanism,” said Corey Miller, Epic's vice president of research and development.
While voice dictation algorithms are becoming a commodity, having AI know where to place parts of the conversation and take actions in an electronic health record is more difficult.
Mary Varghese Presti, a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s healthcare and life sciences division, said the company seeks to bring the product to all of its health system customers.
"All of our clients were saying to us 'what do you have for nurses," she said.
She added, "If you think about nurses using voice, we are being very careful about not hacking our way through it. [We’re] not taking something that exists today, which is the narrative option for physicians and saying, ‘Here nurses, use this.’”
At Mayo, the initial rollout needs more work before the feature can be available to all nurses, said Ryannon Frederick, chief nursing officer at Mayo Clinic. Clinicians have had trouble remembering to start a recording with each patient encounter, Frederick said.
“Our goal is to build out an end-to-end solution that's much more comprehensive," she said.
Still, Frederick said nurses who used the tool tended to describe — both to patients and to the app — more of the tasks they were completing.
Other vendors are preparing their own products. EHR vendor Meditech said it is working on ambient documentation use cases with vendors for nurses. The company is exploring additional use cases for ambient AI to improve the clinical workflows of other clinicians including therapists and home care professionals, a spokesperson said in an email.
Vendors are responding to customer demand, said Prabhjot Singh, a senior advisor at digital health research group Peterson Health Technology Institute. However, the verdict is still out on whether ambient tools offer a long-term return on investment for hospitals, he said.
“Bottom line is that executives are keen to focus on the nursing workforce," Singh said. "They are leaning into the AI solutions really carefully and thoughtfully, because the nursing professions have to be on board with it. To capture the gains, they need to actually start re-engineering how they deliver care.”
A report published last month by Peterson found many claims by ambient AI vendors need additional research. While authors said there were benefits of the technology in reducing physicians' cognitive load, some vendor claims may be overstated.
