In this interview with healthsystemCIO, Baptist Health’s CMIO Dr. Deborah Abram, VP & Chief Nursing Officer Tammy Daniel and Director of Clinical Transformation Bonnie Williams discuss their efforts to enhance nursing workflows using AI technology. Baptist Health, a six-hospital system in Jacksonville, Fla., identified nursing burnout and documentation burdens as key challenges. To address this, they piloted an AI-empowered nursing documentation project, partnering with Microsoft and Nuance, that uses ambient listening to streamline tasks, allowing nurses to spend more time with patients. The project, still in its pilot phase, exemplifies Baptist Health’s commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technology to improve clinical efficiency and enhance nursing satisfaction.
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Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Baptist Health CMIO, Dr. Deborah Abram; VP and Chief Nursing Officer, Tammy Daniel; and Director of Clinical Transformation, Bonnie Williams. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Thanks for joining me, everyone.
Bonnie: Thank you for this opportunity.
Dr. Abram: Thanks for having us.
Tammy: Thank you.
Anthony: Excellent. Let’s start off, Dr. Abram, I’m going to start with you. You want to tell us a little bit about Baptist Health and your role there?
Dr. Abram: I am the system CMIO for Baptist Health. I’m actually a trained pediatrician, and I am the entire system CMIO. We are a six-hospital system with four freestanding emergency rooms and ambulatory care in about 100 offices based in Jacksonville, Florida.
Anthony: Very good. Bonnie, if you just want to talk a little bit about your role.
Bonnie: I’m the Director of Clinical Transformation here at Baptist Health. Within the larger auspices of clinical informatics, I have a small team that focuses on transformative projects such as Ambient nursing that we’ll talk about today, clinical communications, as well as creating, optimizing, automating workflows and processes within clinical technology.
Anthony: Very good. Thank you. Tammy, a little bit about your role.
Tammy: Thank you. I am the chief nursing officer for the health system and I have nurse executives at each of the six hospitals. We have the only children’s hospital in the region. I work directly with the nurse executives in addition to the almost 5,000 nurses that we have throughout our health system, helping to establish standards of care, processes and policies around our best practices. I also oversee the emergency department service line. Dr. Abram mentioned we have several freestanding EDs. We oversee the transportation of all of our patients across our health system and oversee the centralized patient care logistics center. So, that is our major hub that’s a portal for all of our patients that move across and transfer in and out of our health system. In addition we align that with our staffing. We look at where we have the concentration of patients where we’re admitting and discharging, and then flex staffing and pull to the locations based on need. I oversee that centralized logistics center.
Anthony: Excellent. Today we’re going to talk about a project you’re doing around AI-empowered nursing documentation. I’d like to first discuss the problem and then how specifically this problem made it up through the governance process to be addressed. There’s a billion things that people can work on. There’s a limited amount of time and resources. This came up and got tackled.