The clinical burnout crisis in the U.S. has been making headlines for years, and it continues to remain an unsolved problem. Stress and burnout levels have fallen a bit since the pandemic, but the country’s clinical workforce still remains under pressure, typically facing much higher rates of early career exits than workers in other industries.
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 this battle. 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. Integrating documentation AI into nursing workflows has proven more difficult, however — because nurses, unlike physicians, aren’t accustomed to narrating their care out loud.
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.
Reid’s partnership with Abridge began roughly three years ago on the ambulatory side with physician practices, where adoption was high. Given that success, Reid became an early adopter of Abridge’s nursing product in September. The health system was one of the first hospitals to roll it out, and the first to extend it to CNAs and tech roles, said Misti Foust-Cofield, Reid’s chief nursing officer, during an interview earlier this month at Abridge’s event in New York City.
Foust-Cofield said the decision was driven by what she was hearing directly from her nurses on rounds. They were staying late after shifts to finish their charting, and they were leaving work feeling like they hadn’t been able to give patients the quality of care they wanted to give.
At this time, Reid’s RN vacancy rate sat at about 18%, Foust-Cofield added. This is already a major pressure point for rural providers, as recruiting clinicians to work in these communities often requires paying a premium over what comparable hospitals elsewhere offer.
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, Foust-Cofield pointed out.
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.”
That work has begun to pay off. 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.
“They are begging for it,” she said of nurses who haven’t yet been onboarded onto the platform.
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.
Photo: Halfpoint Images, Getty Images
