Across healthcare, time is a precious commodity. And yet, too often, time is spent on work that isn’t focused on patient care. A survey by the American Medical Informatics Association polled physicians, nurses, educators and other healthcare professionals in 2024 about their documentation burden and found that 74.38% said documentation tasks impeded patient care, while 77.42% reported finishing work late or working from home because of excessive documentation.
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises relief. But to make an impact, organizations must adopt AI tools that support healthcare workers by easing burdens and streamlining workflows without causing distractions or disruptions. Most of all, they must opt for tools their team members will want to use.
Microsoft Dragon Copilot is making a positive impact in a variety of healthcare settings — from community hospitals to academic medical centers — by streamlining workflows, reducing administrative burdens and improving clinician satisfaction. Physicians, nurses and radiologists working with the technology find it’s shifting time away from administrative tasks and back to the work that matters most — patient care. Here are three recent examples.
Restoring joy for physicians
The leadership team at Cooper University Health Care recognized that burnout was affecting its clinicians and advanced practice providers, who often spent one to two hours after their shifts on administrative tasks. To help, the team implemented Dragon Copilot, which streamlines documentation, surfaces critical information and automates routine tasks, allowing clinicians to focus on patients.
The effect was immediate. By using ambient listening to securely capture conversations between patients and clinicians and draft clinical notes directly into existing workflows, providers could save more than four minutes in documentation time per patient, which translates to more than one hour per day. Along the way, the technology is helping clinicians reconnect with the human side of medicine.
“We really needed to restore the joy in practice and let the technology do what it should, which is remove friction, remove that cognitive burden of documentation, not add to it,” says Snehal Gandhi, MD, vice president and chief medical informatics officer at Cooper. “Patients are instantly noticing their clinicians are looking at them again, making that eye contact. We’ve had several patients remark that basically, hey, wow, you’re not typing today. That’s the power of AI. It gives eye contact back to medicine, the way it was supposed to be practiced.”
Besides streamlining documentation, Dragon Copilot surfaces relevant information. Physicians can ask questions about a patient’s history and care, for example, and receive fast, trusted answers from transcripts, notes and third-party trusted medical sources in workflow, without having to stop and search in a different system. Dragon Copilot can also automate tasks such as accurate coding suggestions, clinical evidence summaries, referral letters, after-visit summaries and more. In doing so, the technology frees up more time for patient care.
Reclaiming bedside time for nurses
Insufficient staffing, on-the-job stress and poor work-life balance are some of the common challenges that nurses grapple with, according to the American Nurses Association. Mercy’s Fort Smith hospital in Arkansas found that the AI clinical assistant could help lighten the load for their team. Dragon Copilot, which is the first commercially available ambient AI solution for nurses, integrated easily into Mercy’s system and quickly helped the nurses perform their jobs more efficiently and smoothly. Chief nursing officer Stephanie Whitaker says the technology allows her team to engage more with patients and spend less time on the computer.
“We went into nursing because we wanted to care for people, not necessarily be documenting on the computer all the time or have our backs to the patient while we’re trying to document the vital information,” Whitaker says. “We’ve gained significant efficiencies with Dragon Copilot. One nurse shared that Dragon Copilot has saved her approximately two hours of charting in a 12-hour shift. It gives power back to the nurse to spend time at the bedside, having face-to-face interactions.”
Boosting confidence for radiologists
Radiologists are inundated with images, data and documentation. Too often, technologies and tools are fragmented, burdening them with added steps and workflow inefficiencies. But change is afoot. Dragon Copilot now builds on the capabilities of PowerScribe One, ushering in a new era of AI tools for radiologists without disrupting workflows. The technology enables radiologists to access prior report summaries, chat with credible sources, optimize reports for billing and draft report content from image analysis.
At the University of Rochester Medical Center, vice chair of informatics for imaging sciences, Sean Cleary, MD, is optimistic for the potential of tools like these. “As we embrace the next frontier of AI, we know that having cloud-based solutions that work seamlessly with our existing products and systems is paramount,” Cleary says. “Having Dragon Copilot as a companion for PowerScribe One gives me confidence that I can test and benefit from the latest AI advancements with minimal disruptions and distractions.”
Time is a limited resource. You can’t make more of it, but when your team invests in the right AI clinical assistant, you can help clinicians, including doctors, nurses and radiologists, find the right balance that enables them to focus more on patient care.
Learn more today.
