For years, health care’s AI boom has largely centered on physicians. Ambient listening tools promised to automate note-taking, reduce “pajama time” and ease burnout among doctors drowning in administrative work. 

Now, that push is reaching nurses. This morning, Abridge announced that Abridge for Nurses is now generally available across its network of more than 250 health system partners—a significant milestone for a platform that has been moving cautiously, leaders told Newsweek. 

Abridge for Nurses is an ambient documentation tool built specifically for frontline nursing workflows. The platform first emerged through a collaboration with Mayo Clinic in 2024, and has since gone live at systems across the U.S., including Corewell Health (based in Grand Rapids, Michigan), Johns Hopkins Medicine (Baltimore), Emory Healthcare (Atlanta), Bon Secours Mercy Health (Cincinnati) and Reid Health (Richmond, Indiana).

The launch comes as nurses are beginning to use AI more often, according to a new McKinsey & Company report. The consulting firm surveyed more than 500 U.S. nurses. Nearly 65 percent of nurses surveyed said they’re using more AI tools than they were one year ago.

But that growth remains uneven. Twenty-three percent of nurses said they still aren’t using any AI in their daily workflows, and the majority reported usage in the low to moderate range. Only 1 in 10 were considered “superusers,” or nurses who use AI in the majority of, or all, their tasks, according to McKinsey.

Nurses say that trust is the No. 1 barrier to AI adoption right now. That is, in part, why Abridge has taken the process so slowly, Emily Stanforth, the company’s nursing solutions lead, told Newsweek.  

“Unfortunately, a lot of nurses have lost trust in tech,” Stanforth said. “To earn that trust back, it’s critical to put nurses in the driver’s seat of the technology that’s being developed.”  

Health system leaders told Newsweek that Abridge’s collaborative approach has helped build trust among nurses and produced what they described as a tool better suited to the complexity of nursing workflows than earlier clinical AI products.

The rollout, however, has been gradual. Mayo Clinic was the first to launch Abridge for Nurses in early 2025, and last month, the tool was only live on its Florida and Arizona campuses (not on the main campus in Minnesota). Corewell Health, Michigan’s largest health system, operates 21 hospitals but uses Abridge in only two units.

“It’s still very much in development,” Jill Sheipline, vice president and chief nursing information officer at Corewell Health, told Newsweek. “I know that it’s changing rapidly, but from a nursing perspective, there are still very few organizations that are live or using it in some capacity. Even the ones that are, it’s very limited.”  

Abridge declined to say how many nurses are using the platform, saying only that it was live at several health systems as of Tuesday.

As Abridge makes the product available more broadly, questions remain about how quickly health systems and individual nurses will adopt it. Newsweek spoke with nursing leaders at Abridge health systems and beyond to understand what the technology can do, why adoption remains limited and what hospitals should expect if they try it.

Abridge’s nursing platform allows bedside nurses to use ambient AI during patient interactions. Nurses capture conversations on hospital-issued mobile devices, and Abridge’s system drafts documentation directly into nursing flow sheets inside the electronic health record. Nurses then review and approve the documentation before anything enters the chart.  

Unlike physician ambient documentation tools, which typically generate narrative summaries, nursing documentation requires structured data entry into highly specific flow sheets and discrete fields. 

Physician ambient scribes are essentially creating summaries of the visit, Dr. Shiv Rao, co-founder and CEO of Abridge, told Newsweek. For nurses, it’s more like filling out a spreadsheet. 

“It’s a very different machine learning challenge,” Rao said. When asked if it was more challenging to build AI that worked for nurses, he replied with a resounding, “Yes, absolutely.”  

“It just gets harder for all the subsequent versions [of the nursing platform],” he continued. “There’s a significant delta between the first version of a doctor’s note that you can create and one that is clinically useful, compliant and good for all of the different specialties and settings. So that gets to be just as challenging as anything.”  

“But to get started with something that a nurse would use and say, ‘This is great,’ to be able to ring that first bell is definitely harder.”  

Given the sizable challenge at hand, health system leaders said that their rollouts have intentionally relied on pilots, simulations and nurse feedback loops before scaling.

At Mayo Clinic, nurses worked alongside Abridge developers to shape workflows and test prototypes before deployment. Ryannon Frederick, Mayo Clinic’s system chief nursing officer, said nurses became “developers, side-by-side with Abridge” during the buildout process.

“From the get-go, we really said to Mayo Clinic nurses, ‘What’s the problem we’re trying to solve? What’s your workflow?’” Frederick said. “I think all health care tech needs to be created that way.”

How Are Health Systems Approaching Change Management on Nursing Units? 

Health system leaders agreed that the biggest challenge has not been technical implementation, but behavioral change. 

At Corewell Health, nurses underwent simulation labs to practice what leaders call “nursing out loud”—verbally narrating assessments and care activities so the AI can appropriately capture them. 

“We almost had to go back to the basics of nursing,” said Sheipline. “Nurses are not always great at narrating their care.”  

That shift has required nurses to narrate clinically relevant information while still maintaining patient-friendly language. For example, Sheipline’s team noticed that nurses frequently used the word “good” when describing lung sounds to patients. Post-Abridge, they’ve been coached to use more specific terminology, like, “The bilateral lung sounds are clear.”

Some organizations identified a surprisingly steep learning curve for younger nurses, who are typically associated with more technological fluency. The challenge is not using the device, but having the confidence and bedside manner required to narrate actions in real time, according to Stanforth.  

“The technology is pretty straightforward, but the conversational care and communication with patients varies based on a nurse’s experience and tenure,” she said. “It’s interesting because this technology is really, really intuitive for later-career or more experienced nurses, because they just have a much stronger sense of their own skills and a stronger confidence in being able to verbalize to their patients.” 

Abridge provides coaching staff to help nurses learn the ropes and has found that recent graduates benefit from peer support.

Even if the language isn’t exact, the platform can pick up on nuance and context to fill in the blanks. Sheipline described one instance where a nurse told a patient she was applying “squeezy things” to their legs. The AI correctly translated that phrase into sequential compression devices within the chart.  

At Reid Health, leaders also used simulation labs and TikTok-style educational clips to ease the transition.

“We developed a whole page of quick tidbits of information that we can get out to our team members through TikTok and Facebook,” Misti Foust, vice president and chief nursing officer at Reid Health, told Newsweek. “The team members love it…it fits into their normal day, their normal scrolling [habits] and regular platforms.” 

Several organizations also emphasized that adoption remains voluntary, although they’ve seen nurses utilize the tool—and even demand it—in the majority of cases. 

At Mayo Clinic, Frederick said one surprise was how willing both patients and nurses were to participate. Patients opted into ambient recording at rates in the “high 80 percents,” and the system saw measurable improvements in patient satisfaction scores across all seven deployment units. 

“Specifically, the patients and families are telling us that they have a better understanding of what the nurse is doing, why is it important and what’s going on in their care,” Frederick said, adding that the tool makes them “feel like they’re a part of the care team, they’re more informed to make good decisions.” 

Patients have also reported a reduction in anxiety on the units that utilize Abridge, Frederick said: “At times, we’ve had family members who tell us that they actually feel comfortable leaving because they know that their loved one is in good hands and that the loved one knows what’s going on.”

Corewell Health similarly reported that no patients have opted out so far. 

“The patients love the way that the nurses are able to spend more time with them in conversation, versus being at a computer,” Sheipline said.  

What Happens Next? 

There’s one major difference between health systems that adopt nurse AI tools successfully and those that stall in the pilot phase, according to Gretchen Berlin, a registered nurse, senior partner in McKinsey’s health care practice and author of its latest report on AI and nurses. 

“It comes down to really treating it as a transformation of workflows, engaging nurses in the technology selection, in the design,” Berlin said, “not adding technology on top of an existing process, without treating it as a full transformation.” 

If frontline involvement is the key, then existing Abridge rollouts have been getting it right—so far. Health systems say the current deployments likely represent only the beginning of AI’s role in nursing workflows. 

At Corewell Health, early pilot users have already demonstrated meaningful time savings. Nurses with the highest adoption rates saved nearly 30 minutes per shift on documentation tasks, according to Sheipline.  

Leaders also see future applications extending beyond inpatient documentation into emergency response, surgery, EMS and labor and delivery. 

“I see endless possibilities,” Foust said. “This is the most excited I’ve been about something brought forward in the profession in my 25 to 30 years as a nurse.”  

Nothing else even comes close, she attested. 

For now, many health systems appear willing to move deliberately rather than rush deployment, a notable contrast to the rapid acceleration of AI tools elsewhere in health care. Both health systems and researchers caution that broader adoption will depend on whether organizations can prove that AI improves care without eroding trust along the way. 

“Trust is so important with nurses,” Stanforth said. “We often say around here that it’s earned in drops and lost in buckets.”