HJAR Jan/Feb 2026

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS I  JAN / FEB 2026 49 For weekly eNews updates and to read the journal online, visit HealthcareJournalAR.com expertise in health system finance position him well to help guide Arkansas Children’s through its largest-ever expansion — a $370 million invest- ment to enhance patient care, facilities, and med- ical innovation. Mercy Advances Groundbreaking AI Tool for Nursing Through Collaboration withMicrosoft Dragon Copilot 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 con- sent of patients, Dragon Copilot uses ambient AI to document nursing observations from conver- sations 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 Hospital Fort Smith as well as Mercy hospitals in St. Louis and Spring- field, Missouri, with more Mercy locations, includ- ing Mercy Northwest Arkansas, expected to adopt it in the coming months. Mercy is one of eight health systems across the country working closely with Microsoft and front- line nurses to shape the technology. At Mercy, medical-surgical nurses, including many in Fort Smith, participated in the Dragon Copilot devel- opment, 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 documenta- tion 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, clin- ical 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 technol- ogy 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, interact- ing 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 documen- tation 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 work- flow, reducing time spent navigating mul- tiple 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 elec- tronic medical record, they’re noticing their docu- mentation 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 ambi- ent AI solution for nursing workflows in Micro- soft Dragon Copilot has been an incredible jour- ney,” 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 informat- ics team at Mercy was really valuable in shaping this technology around real-world needs, deliver- ing innovation that reduces administrative burden and giving nurses more time for bedside care.” Baptist HealthMedical Center– North Little Rock Earns Advanced Certification in Spine Surgery fromThe Joint Commission Baptist Health Medical Center–North Little Rock has earned The Joint Commission’s Gold Seal of Approval for Advanced Certification in Spine Sur- gery (ACSS) by demonstrating continuous compli- ance with its performance standards. Offered in collaboration with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the certifica- tion helps organizations provide consistent com- munication and collaboration among all health- care providers involved in the care of the patient. Baptist Health Medical Center–North Little Rock was evaluated by a Joint Commission reviewer on clinical information management, program man- agement, supporting self-management, deliver- ing or facilitating clinical care, surgical site infec- tion rates, new neurological deficit, unplanned return visit to the operating room, and patient reported outcomes. n Brandon Yoder, CPA, MBA