| Nurses need documentation AI too
AI-powered documentation tools — which listen in on patient-provider interactions to generate clinical documentation in real time — have emerged in the last few years as a real weapon to fight clinical burnout. But so far, most of these deployments have occurred among physicians. Nurses make up a much larger portion of the healthcare workforce, though, and their documentation burden is also heavy. To give nurses some relief, hospitals across the country are testing out ways to introduce and scale documentation tools within nursing units. At Reid Health, a rural health system in Indiana and Ohio, nurses are using Abridge’s tool to capture patient interactions as they happen and help eliminate their documentation backlog. Rollout
The biggest challenge in rolling out the tool wasn't technical — it was getting nurses comfortable with the idea of narrating their assessments conversationally, with the patient present and listening, pointed out Misti Foust-Cofield, Reid’s chief nursing officer. To get there, Reid leaned heavily on simulation training. It also partnered with a local nursing school to build that communication style into their curriculum. Reid used TikTok and Instagram reels for training as well, Foust-Cofield added. The health system recognized that the majority of its nurses were women with busy family lives — so they needed flexible, on-the-go learning rather than mandatory in-person sessions.
“To utilize Abridge, our nurses needed to be confident and enthusiastic about caring out loud,” Foust-Cofield remarked. “Typically, during their head-to-toe assessment, there were some things they may not have shared and some things they may have shared — but definitely not with the detail that was required to use Abridge. It really makes sense, though — after utilizing the tool, patients are now far more informed about what's going on. But it did take a lot of work.” Results
Nurses who are high utilizers of the tool are spending 30-45 fewer minutes on documentation per shift — time they're either putting back into patient care or using to get home on time, Foust-Cofield stated. Reid's RN vacancy rate has also dropped from 18% to 8% since the rollout, and the health system is now bringing in more new graduate nurses than at any point in Foust-Cofield's 18-year tenure. Reid is currently in an expansion phase, moving from 30% of nursing staff to full enterprise-wide rollout by the end of the third quarter, Foust-Cofield said. — By Katie Adams |
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