Giving Report: How Microsoft, HCA and Google Plan to Improve Shift Changes

Image source: Google

“Giving Report” —the vital process of transferring patient information from nurse to nurse during shift changes—are critical to patient safety but often time-consuming and error-prone. A new collaboration among Microsoft, HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud is making this process more efficient with a digital, AI-powered solution.

The Challenge of Traditional Hand-Offs

At HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest hospital system, nurses spend 10 million hours yearly on handoff paperwork—notes, reports, and verbal exchanges that vary widely and risk missed details. As nurse Samantha Hall explains, “Depending on the types of patients and which nurses are giving the report, you could end up with a pretty big stack of papers.”

Across HCA’s 190 hospitals and 2,400 ambulatory sites of care, the company estimates that nurses repeat the same task 60,000 times every day.

The Digital Solution: ‘Nurse Handoff’ App

HCA Healthcare’s Digital Transformation team, working with Google Cloud and Microsoft technologies, launched Nurse Handoff, an AI-driven mobile app that uses Google’s advanced language models to generate accurate patient summaries from electronic health records. Nurses receive a consolidated, editable report on mobile devices, reducing manual note-taking and improving accuracy.

Dr. Whitney Staub-Juergens, HCA’s VP of Transformation Operations, states, “Nurse handoff communication is critical to any hospital and is fundamental to the role of registered nurses for safely exchanging communication and care about a patient. It’s how they fundamentally get organized for the next 12 hours.”

Pilot use in five hospitals showed the AI summaries were 86% accurate and 90% helpful, cutting handoff time and potentially saving nurses millions of hours annually.

HCA Healthcare plans a broad rollout of Nurse Handoff, aiming to standardize communication, reduce nurse burnout from documentation, and enhance patient safety systemwide. 

 

🤔 Nurses, what do you think about an app to help with nurse handoffs? Share your thoughts in the discussion forum below.