The healthcare workforce crisis — especially nurse shortages — has made headlines consistently for years. However, despite broad awareness and industrywide efforts to expand nursing pipelines and retain experienced staff, a concrete solution to the problem remains out of reach. Changing demographics and rising patient acuity are outpacing health systems’ ability to build and sustain a strong nursing workforce.
There’s no single tactic or strategy that can reverse these trends and fully equip health systems with the teams and resources necessary to meet future demand. To avoid the worst effects of this crisis, leading health systems will need to embrace innovation and transform their workforce — both to strengthen their own organizations and to serve as replicable models of success for others.
Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic is doing just that. In 2024, the system teamed up with Abridge and Epic to equip nurses with cutting-edge, AI-powered technology. On April 3, 2025, Julia Chou, Chief Operating Officer with Abridge, and Ryannon Frederick, MS RN, Mayo’s chief nursing officer, discussed the co-development during a webinar hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review. The discussion offered insights into how this collaboration — and more like it — can help support nurses and increase the likelihood of a sustainable future for the healthcare workforce. Insights from the conversation are summarized below.
Forged on the front lines
Early in the collaboration, both Abridge and Mayo leaders understood that the nurse documentation solution would have to differ in certain ways from Abridge’s ambient AI solution for physician documentation. That solution has been integrated at more than 100 health systems — including Mayo — and has been highly effective at reducing physicians’ administration burden. Still, that solution would not be an exact fit for nurses because their workflows differ significantly from those of their physician counterparts.
According to Ms. Chou, physician documentation practices are more notes based while nurses must document in discrete fields.
“We had to start from the ground up and really think through with Mayo what the most important use cases were,” Ms. Chou said. “We had to find the most tedious tasks…we needed to take that burden off of nurses.”
To ensure the tool was tailored to specific needs, nurses were included directly in the creation process from the very beginning.
“We brought our co-development teams from Abridge and Epic to our campus and into our simulation centers,” Ms. Frederick said, adding that leaders from all three organizations watched nurses simulate their workflow to inform the initial direction of the project. From there, the team continued to gather feedback from nurses and make refinements as needed.
“We’re making consistent changes based on [nurse] feedback and then they’re seeing it in action,” Ms. Frederick said. “That’s the secret sauce. We’re not just giving them a tool and then managing them through [adoption], we’re creating a tool that’s built for nurses by nurses.”
Documenting the ‘invisible’
The pilot launched across seven Mayo Clinic sites in just eight weeks. Adoption exceeded expectations. One of the key benefits of the tool highlighted by staff has been the tool’s ability to document care that was previously “invisible” in the EHR.
“So much of what a nurse does is invisible. We’re assessing a million different things in our heads, but people don’t know that — patients don’t know that,” Ms. Frederick said. “There is so much that the nurse does to keep patients safe and well cared for that doesn’t get documented. This tool is just automatically picking that stuff up and making sure it is reflected in our charts.”
By easing the documentation burden on nurses, this new approach lays the groundwork for unlocking the broader potential of integrating ambient AI into clinical care workflows.. With more time given back to nurses, significant efficiency gains related to clinical communication and care coordination are within reach. Improvements in both those areas will ultimately translate into meaningful benefits for patients.
“What’s tremendously exciting is that we’re just at the very beginning and already seeing incredible results,” Ms. Chou said. “We’re seeing incredible engagement, incredible adoption and there is so much more we can still do…to provide net-new value.”
‘Nursing out loud’
At Mayo, nurses are now encouraged to “nurse out loud” and capture those elements of care delivery that have previously gone undocumented. Over time, this added information will help optimize the tool for maximum benefit. From there, leaders from both Mayo and Abridge hope to help nurses around the world to get access to this technology and transform the profession. “When we started this, the goal wasn’t to solve documentation only for Mayo Clinic,” Ms. Frederick said. “It was to make a difference for nurses across the globe. …We want nurses and patients everywhere to feel the benefits of nursing out loud.”
