VentureBeat/Ideogram

Clinician and patient satisfaction (or lack thereof) is a significant issue in healthcare — patients because they can struggle to get access to care, clinicians because they simply have too much to do. 

The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) set out to tackle this challenge with the integration of Microsoft’s DAX Copilot last year. And it’s already had a big impact: Early results show seven minutes saved per encounter, a 70% reduction in clinician-reported burnout and fatigue, and 93% of patients report a better or equivalent care experience.

“Access to care is probably one of the biggest issues patients face,” Glen Kearns, EVP and CIO of TOH, told VentureBeat. “If we can improve the throughput, even a couple of patients per physician per shift, you multiply that by 10 physicians in a care setting, then multiply that by 365 — that’s not an inconsequential increase in access to care.” 

Ambient AI as an active assistant

TOH was the first Canadian hospital to pilot Microsoft’s DAX Copilot, which is directly integrated with the widely used electronic health record (EHR) platform Epic. In March, Microsoft bundled DAX Copilot with Dragon Medical One (DMO) into the embedded AI assistant Microsoft Dragon Copilot, which the tech giant says is used by more than 600,000 physicians. 

DAX Copilot, which is out of the box, captures