When FMOL Health in Baton Rouge, La., began pushing ambient listening technology across its clinical teams roughly 18 months ago, the physician side was the primary focus. Nursing was separate and the technology needed adjustments to fit into their complex, fast-paced workflows.
Will Landry, senior vice president and CIO at FMOL Health, said the organization moved carefully before extending ambient tools to its inpatient nursing units. The concern was practical: nursing workflows run on flowsheets and documentation structures that differ significantly from the notes-based workflows where ambient technology had already proven itself with physicians. Before FMOL Health committed, it wasn’t clear where the efficiency gains would actually appear.
Two pilots later — one in the Jackson, Miss., market and one in Baton Rouge — the answer has surprised his team.
“We were a little hesitant with ambient nursing at first just because we didn’t know how that was going,” Mr. Landry said during an interview with the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “But our nursing teams have really liked it, and it’s been really positive.”
The pilots surfaced documentation efficiencies his IT team hadn’t anticipated going in. The results were good enough that FMOL Health is now planning to extend ambient listening further across its clinical operations—and Mr. Landry says his team’s original hesitancy has given way to confidence in the technology’s range.
What made the rollout succeed wasn’t the preparation that happened before go-live. It was what his team did after.
“Pretraining only has so much value, but making sure that we’re there to train and assist during the use is way more valuable than some of the pretraining,” he said. “We did that with ambient nursing where we had a lot of people on-site on the floors assisting with it, and that went very well.”
The floor presence gave nursing staff the confidence and the support to work through the technology in real clinical conditions — encountering and resolving problems with trained help available rather than working around them alone. The approach reinforces a broader shift Mr. Landry is pursuing inside his IT organization: moving away from a traditional implementation mindset and toward continuous, at-the-elbow engagement with clinical workflows.
The ambient nursing expansion is part of a larger set of initiatives underway at FMOL Health. The system has been executing community connect implementations, bringing Epic to partner facilities, primarily smaller and rural sites across Louisiana and Mississippi, while simultaneously working to retire legacy systems and reduce the technical debt accumulated during the organization’s earlier implementation years. The current phase is revisiting decisions made years ago, working directly with operations teams to find workarounds still embedded in daily workflow, and clearing them.
The ambient nursing results have accelerated his confidence in the technology’s broader potential.
“It just makes documentation and using the system so much more efficient,” Mr. Landry said. “We’re really excited about that.”
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