Mercy Advances Groundbreaking AI Tool for Nursing Through Collaboration with Microsoft Dragon Copilot

Technology allows nurses to spend more time with patients

ST. LOUIS, Nov. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Mercy is helping lead the way in transforming nursing care through technology. In collaboration with Microsoft, Mercy is playing a key role in the development of the first commercially available ambient AI solution for nurses within Microsoft Dragon Copilot.

Ambient AI operates in the background and is designed to adapt to and recognize human interactions in everyday settings. With the consent of patients, Dragon Copilot uses ambient AI to document nursing observations from conversations between a patient and caregiver which automatically feed into the patient's electronic health record. This new tool is already being used in inpatient units at Mercy hospitals in St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri, and Fort Smith, Arkansas, with more Mercy locations expected to adopt it later this year.

Mercy is one of eight health systems across the country working closely with Microsoft and frontline nurses to shape the technology. At Mercy, medical-surgical nurses participated in the Dragon Copilot development, where they narrated their care in real time to help test and improve the system.

Nurses face growing challenges every day, including staffing shortages, heavy documentation demands and constant multitasking. The goal of the ambient nursing capabilities within Dragon Copilot is to ease those burdens, not add more technology, said Cheryl Denison, clinical integration director with Mercy's Office of Transformation.

"We're seeing firsthand how Dragon Copilot is transforming the environment of care while also directly supporting nursing practice," Denison said. "By enabling nurses to document care more naturally through speech, ambient voice technology reduces cognitive load while also enabling them to do more of what they became a nurse to do in the first place – care for patients, interacting and engaging with them to an even greater degree."

With the World Health Organization projecting a global nursing shortage of 4.5 million by 2030, tools like Dragon Copilot could play a key role in supporting nurse retention and job satisfaction. Recent surveys show that 65% of nurses report high levels of stress and burnout, while more than 25% of their shift is consumed by documentation and administrative tasks. Dragon Copilot addresses these issues by improving workflow and nursing practice through:

• Streamlined Documentation: Nurses audibly narrate care to be captured and transformed into flow sheet documentation, which they can review, edit and seamlessly file into the electronic health record.
• Clinical Insight Access: Nurses can retrieve trusted medical content within the workflow, reducing time spent navigating multiple systems.
• Task Automation: AI helps draft notes and summarize patient interactions, reducing clicks and speeding up documentation.

This technology is shaped by real feedback from nurses at Mercy and other health systems. Their input guided every step of development, with a focus on reducing clicks, improving collaboration and giving nurses more time with patients.

The solution, with ambient AI capabilities, is designed to support the largest workforce in health care — nurses — by giving them more time to focus on what matters most: their patients. Stephanie Whitaker, chief nursing officer at Mercy Hospital Fort Smith, said the tool has made a noticeable difference in how nurses spend their time.

"Many of our nurses have said that by narrating as they provide care, which is pulled into the electronic medical record, they're noticing their documentation is much more robust. We cannot wait to roll it out across all of Mercy," Whitaker said.

Mercy metrics provided by Microsoft show:

• 21% reduction in documentation latency
• 65% improvement in perceived timeliness
• 8-24 minutes saved per shift for high-use nurses
• 29% reduction in incremental overtime
• 300% increase in mobile platform use
• 4.5% increase in patient satisfaction

"Partnering with Mercy to develop the ambient AI solution for nursing workflows in Microsoft Dragon Copilot has been an incredible journey," said Umesh Rustogi, general manager with Dragon and Platform, Health and Life Sciences, Microsoft. "The real-time feedback from both the frontline nurses as well as the nursing informatics team at Mercy was really valuable in shaping this technology around real-world needs, delivering innovation that reduces administrative burden and giving nurses more time for bedside care."

Mercy , one of the 15 largest U.S. health systems and named the top large system in the U.S. for excellent patient experience by NRC Health, serves millions annually with nationally recognized care and one of the nation's largest and highest performing Accountable Care Organizations in quality and cost. Mercy is a highly integrated, multi-state health care system including 55 acute care and specialty (heart, children's, orthopedic and rehab) hospitals, convenient and urgent care locations, imaging centers and pharmacies. Mercy has over 1,000 physician practice locations and outpatient facilities, more than 5,000 physicians and advanced practitioners and more than 50,000 caregivers serving patients and families across Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. Mercy also has clinics, outpatient services and outreach ministries in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. In fiscal year 2025 alone, Mercy provided more than half a billion dollars of free care and other community benefits, including traditional charity care and unreimbursed Medicaid. 

SOURCE Mercy