At Advocate Health, nurses save 1.5 minutes per message when Art helps them draft a reply. Across thousands of replies, that adds up—Advocate has been able to shift two full-time nurses from message triage to patient phone calls, speeding up responses on both phone and MyChart.
“I’m grateful for technology that gives our nurses more time to do what brought them to nursing in the first place: care for patients,” said Daphne Daugherty, nurse manager of the Patient Access & Care Team – Nurse Triage at Advocate Health. “Art helps reduce the administrative work surrounding patient messages and fits naturally into our existing workflow, while keeping nursing judgment at the center. It isn’t about replacing the nurse. It’s about supporting nurses in working at the top of their license, creating more time to listen, assess, guide, and care for the patients who count on us.”
Patients increasingly reach their care team through MyChart messages, and nurses are often the first to read them and reply. As patient messages come in, Art routes each one to the right person based on the contents—for example, lab result questions to nurses, scheduling questions to front-office staff, and messages in a language other than English to multilingual staff. At OhioHealth, where a central team of nurses handles MyChart messages across the health system, 87% of those nurses reported saving time with Art’s routing.
Art also assigns messages an urgency level, so time-sensitive concerns move to the top of the list. After hours, these urgent messages can be routed to an on-call clinician so they don’t sit in the queue until the next business day. At OhioHealth, messages marked urgent were read 2.5 hours faster and got a first action 3.6 hours faster than routine ones. And at WVU Medicine, after Art flagged a patient’s message as urgent, the care team read the message, suspected stroke, and reached the patient within 12 minutes of the message being sent. They directed the patient to the emergency room, where stroke was confirmed and treated.
“Early recognition and swift action directly supported a potentially life-saving outcome,” said Courtney Pilkerton, MD, a family medicine physician at WVU Medicine.
At each step, nurses make the decisions while Art handles the administrative work.
“Art saves time on routine messaging, allowing me to spend more time addressing patient needs and clinical priorities while also providing more detailed communication,” said WVU Medicine clinic manager Tricia Smith, RN. “I still review all messages and use my clinical judgment, but Art has become a helpful tool for improving efficiency and timely patient communication.”
“Healthcare leaders tell us that digital connection between visits has become critical to keeping patients engaged and healthy,” said Shashank Raghu, Senior Director of R&D for Clinical Communications and Mobile Solutions at Epic. “Art enables health systems to meet patients where they are and support meaningful interactions, while giving time back to nursing—the connective tissue of care teams.”
