TGH nurses take time back with AI-powered listening tech

Hospital: Tampa General

Size: 1,040 beds 

Budget: $3.4 billion

Technology: Microsoft’s ambient listening for nurses

In June, Tampa General Hospital introduced Microsoft ambient listening capabilities for nurses to use through an app called Epic Rover. The goal is to reduce the administrative burden on nurses — who can spend as much as 15% of their shifts filling out documentation, studies have shown. 

“Our guiding philosophy has always been to put our team members first, so they feel engaged, supported and empowered to show up at their best for our patients,” Wendi Goodson-Celerin, executive vice president and chief nursing executive at TGH says in a release. “Microsoft’s ambient listening technology can give nurses back hours of time per shift that they’d ordinarily spend manually entering data into a computer, and the research shows that this is time they would prefer to spend at the bedside with their patients, upskilling newer nurses and honing their craft. In this way, it is giving nurses the gift of more capacity to what they were trained to do, and what no one else does better.”

The new, AI-powered ambient listening tool is similar to Dax Copilot, which became available to more than 500 TGH physicians in June 2024, the hospital says. The app-based program listens to patients as they describe their symptoms, observations and experiences to their nurses, then automatically converts those conversations into specialty-specific clinical summaries in seconds, the release says. This frees up nurses to spend more time providing direct patient care, training others or investing in their own personal development. 

The program also closes the time gap between patient assessments and documentation in their charts, essentially updating medical records in real time as they describe them to their nurse. 

“When approaching the rollout of ambient technology for nurses, we took a hard look at how we could use existing technology in new ways to drive the most meaningful impact – both for our team members and for patients,” TGH chief nursing informatics officer Amit Patel says in the release. “We’re proud to see this solution in action, enabling the personal connections that ultimately result in world-class care.”