The nursing workflow is exclusive—and any options developed for nurses should be purpose-built to combine with the best way by which they work. That’s why we positioned the voice of nurses on the middle of our ongoing work to design and develop an answer that augments nurses’ every day workflows and is now within the fingers of nurses throughout a number of supplier organizations.
Rising demand, extreme documentation necessities, and inefficient workflows are all contributing to nurses’ exhaustion, emotions of burnout, and excessive turnover charges.
Based mostly on latest conversations I’ve had with nursing executives, one factor is crystal clear: to make an actual distinction for sufferers and clinicians, innovation must move all through the care continuum—and the nursing workflow isn’t any exception. It’s the most ubiquitous given nurses comprise the biggest workforce in healthcare.
With 32% of nurses planning to exit the US workforce this 12 months1 and the World Well being Group (WHO) predicting a scarcity of 4.5 million nurses by 2030,2 the urgency to ship expertise to help the nursing career is felt greater than ever.
Nursing data hub
Empower nurses to effectively doc care
Listening to nurses’ voices
The individuals who really perceive the intricacies and challenges of nursing workflows are those that reside and breathe it day-after-day. To construct an progressive resolution that’s impactful, nurses and their management have to be the guiding mild of the method, from design to launch and all through to profitable adoption by the workforce.
As Lea Ann Arnold, Director of Nursing Informatics at Northwestern Drugs, explains:
“Nurses have to be on the desk. They have to be a voice; they want to have the ability to assist expertise groups work out you may’t simply put an answer on the market. You have to get into the precise workflows and perceive how nurses work.”
Lea Ann Arnold, Director of Nursing Informatics at Northwestern Drugs
Terry McDonnell, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Govt at Duke Well being, agrees: “The primary key in guaranteeing that any expertise goes to achieve success or helpful for nurses is to actually contain nurses within the design.”
“Setting nurses up for achievement and ensuring that they’re a part of the answer is essential. We can’t anticipate them to simply accept an answer simply because we expect it’s the solution to do it. We have to convey nurses together with the choice and ensure they really feel that they perceive easy methods to use the expertise,” mentioned Tammy Daniel, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer at Baptist Well being of Northeast Florida.
AI within the nursing workflow
AI is quickly evolving expertise, and it’s essential that its powers are prolonged to nursing workflows. Nurses must handle their workloads in a approach that doesn’t result in elevated stress and burnout, permitting nurses to focus their vitality on affected person care.
“It’s so important for our nurses to know AI,” says Arnold. “Then they begin to understand that that including AI is just not meant to exchange the human issue, however it’s actually meant to enhance and take off that work that might be performed by a machine.”
Microsoft is dedicated to empowering clients with cutting-edge instruments designed to harness the facility of generative AI. Our dedication to innovation continues in our newest funding in industry-specific options that allow companies to undertake and combine AI applied sciences swiftly and effectively. We’re seizing the outstanding alternative that AI presents in healthcare, propelling the {industry} in the direction of a transformative future.
Making a purpose-built resolution with nurses on the desk
Although physicians and nurses work intently collectively to deal with and look after sufferers, the working day of a nurse seems very totally different to that of a doctor, and nursing documentation workflow is likewise separate and distinct. Nurses are cell throughout their shift, transferring between rooms to see their sufferers. They’ve bedside conversations and seize affected person info in extremely structured codecs corresponding to flowsheets.
Microsoft has been on a multi-year journey to deal with the problem of nursing documentation and sophisticated workflows with subtle AI to construct an answer we’ve deployed at a number of clients.
We gathered suggestions from a whole lot of frontline nurses, nurse managers, and executives. Our staff has spent hours shadowing nurses throughout their shifts to see how they perform their duties and to find the place the best factors of friction exist all through their day.
We established the ambient class 5 years in the past for doctor documentation and now a whole lot of organizations use our AI capabilities for scientific workflow. We’re constructing on that success and defining the usual for AI in nursing.
“Sufferers are complicated, and we’d like to consider how we’re going to doc otherwise—as a result of in the end the worth of nursing is again on the bedside, it isn’t the taxing work of documenting in a flowsheet. With the work that Microsoft has performed with suppliers, I used to be very excited to be chosen as one of many pilot websites to really inform that roadmap.”
Gretchen Brown, Chief Nursing Info Officer at Stanford Well being Care
We’re actively collaborating with a number of main healthcare organizations—together with Advocate Well being, Baptist Well being of Northeast Florida, Duke Well being, Intermountain Well being Saint Joseph Hospital, Mercy, Northwestern Drugs, NYU Langone Well being, Stanford Well being Care, and Tampa Common Hospital—and constructing an AI resolution that addresses nursing documentation by finishing flowsheets supported by ambient expertise, permitting nurses to focus much less on paperwork and extra on their sufferers. Many of those organizations have already deployed a preview model as we additional optimize the capabilities earlier than making them usually obtainable.
Tapping into our confirmed observe document with Dragon Medical and digital well being document (EHR) embedded workflows, our preliminary work on this area builds on a longstanding strategic relationship and joint improvement collaboration with Epic.
Discover the potential of AI for nursing
Nursing is on the point of vital innovation. We see this with the momentum of digital nursing, the place well being methods are investing in applied sciences targeted on supporting nursing care groups. We intention to fulfill the speedy ache level of documentation and, in time, basically reshape the expertise of nurses, serving to to evolve that have into one thing intuitive and environment friendly, the place the non-patient care work will be facilitated by leading edge applied sciences working within the backdrop, returning the human connection of affected person and nurse to the forefront.
As I interact within the dialogue between nursing leaders and {industry} innovators, I’ve little question the long run shall be remodeled. Collectively, we’ve the ambition and the conviction to level these breakthrough applied sciences at our most crucial issues, in help of among the most important members of the healthcare {industry}: our nurses!
1Surveyed nurses contemplate leaving direct affected person care at elevated charges, McKinsey, 2022.
2Nursing and midwifery, World Well being Group, 2024.
As VP, Portfolio Evolution & Incubation, Well being & Life Sciences at Microsoft, Mary Varghese Presti leads the event of generative AI-based workflows for care staff members, together with nurses. Mary is a senior healthcare expertise govt with over 25 years of expertise main development and innovation in public and privately held healthcare expertise and life sciences firms worldwide. Mary began her profession as a pediatric nurse at Johns Hopkins and leveraged that scientific expertise as a touchstone as she expanded to technique, biopharma and expertise. She obtained her bachelor’s diploma in nursing from the College of Pennsylvania and her grasp’s diploma in well being coverage from Johns Hopkins College.