Expanding its commitment to technological innovation in healthcare, Tampa General Hospital (TGH) has integrated Microsoft's ambient listening technology into Epic's Rover mobile application, specifically to assist bedside nurses. This cutting-edge tool captures spoken updates during care delivery and helps automate documentation—a task that currently consumes up to 15% of a nurse’s shift. By lightening this administrative load, TGH aims not only to free up more time for direct patient care but also to boost nurse satisfaction and streamline workflow. The initiative reflects TGH’s broader vision of leveraging AI to enhance both the caregiver experience and patient outcomes across the board.

"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," said Wendi Goodson-Celerin, executive vice president and chief nursing executive at Tampa General. "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."

Like DAX Copilot, whose ambient listening capabilities are now part of Microsoft Dragon Copilot and became available to more than 500 physicians affiliated with Tampa General in June 2024, the new ambient listening capabilities for nurses can securely capture a patient story, including details of symptoms, observations and experiences and automatically convert it into specialty-specific, clinical summaries in seconds, making it possible for nurses to spend more time providing direct patient care, training the next generation of nursing team members and investing in their own professional development.

"We have long believed that the best, most successful innovations emerge as answers to real-world problems," said Amit Patel, chief nursing informatics officer at Tampa General. "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. We're proud to see this solution in action, enabling the personal connections that ultimately result in world-class care."

Within the first few months of implementation, Tampa General aims to strengthen care coordination and free nurses' time to focus on providing direct care by reducing the time spent charting and closing the time gap between patient assessments and documentation in their charts.