Nursing is about providing care for the sick—or should be. However, The United States Surgeon General’s Advisory on Building a Thriving Health Workforce estimated that nurses spend an average of 40% of their time on documentation. It’s crucial in providing adequate multi-disciplinary care, as it serves as the main communication between providers and logs information that may be important in prescribing medications, treatment protocols and even predicting future complications. While thorough documentation is important, it’s also easy to argue that a nurse’s time would be better spent providing face-to-face care for patients rather than just writing about it.
In addition to taking away from the time available for patient care, the burden of documentation can lead to nurses being less satisfied in their jobs, which eventually leads to burnout.
Kimberly Kalnitzky, an LPN with over 20 years of nursing experience, agreed, saying: “Documentation is and will always be the more difficult part of nursing. Everything you do and all interventions performed must be documented precisely.” Kalnitzky has been working in home health for the last 10 years, and noted, “When the entirety of your work day was taken up by the physical interventions of nursing, it means waiting to document, usually well past the end of your shift.”
So, what is a solution to this hurdle in healthcare? Artificial Intelligence might have the answer.
Many Oklahomans know Trent Smith from his lengthy football career as a tight end both at OU and in the NFL, playing for both the Ravens and 49ers. Smith has since moved into the healthcare arena, and is currently working as the founder and CEO of Accentra Home Health and Hospice.
After receiving feedback from his nurses, Smith recognized that the amount of time it took to complete documentation was a major issue. “During COVID, the world was shutting down, and here were my nurses walking straight into the fire to help people,” Smith said. “The best we could do as an industry was to call them healthcare heroes or essential workers and put some thank-you signs in their yards. It all seemed really inadequate for the job that they were doing.”
Smith was already familiar with generative AI such as Chat GPT and set off to build software that would assist nurses working at his agency. “I thought I could build a product using this technology and actually treat our nurses like the heroes they are. It decreases their workload dramatically and eliminates the worst part of their job,” he explained.
And so, Apricot Technologies was born. This Oklahoma City-based tech company has created a generative AI application to reduce the burden of healthcare documentation. Designed for nurses, Apricot’s website claims “Home Health Care documentation done in 15 minutes, flat.” Apricot, named after the color of nursing graduation regalia, is an app that allows nurses to quickly and accurately chart after each home health visit. Smith described Apricot as a “wildly educated, experienced clinician” that is essentially an AI scribe. He said that the first nurse in his company who used Apricot found it to be an emotional experience, saying it was going to be life-changing.
“In home healthcare specifically, nurse turnover exceeds 30% a year” Smith said. “Since we have implemented Apricot in our agency, our turnover rate is non-existent. This was never meant to be a business, it was just something I made for my nursing staff. It’s incredibly humbling and rewarding to have done something that actually makes a difference.”
