The Best Rounding Conversation Is the One You Didn’t Have to Write Down

By Katie Haifley, Senior Product Director, NRC Health 

Let’s talk about clipboards. (Stay with us.) 

If you’ve ever rounded on a unit, you know the drill. You’re mid-conversation with a patient who’s finally telling you the thing—the real thing—about their stay.  

Maybe it’s about the nurse who went above and beyond last night. Maybe it’s the fact that they’ve been cold for two days and nobody’s brought them another blanket. Maybe it’s something seemingly small that turns out to matter a lot. 

And in the middle of it, you’re thumbing through a tablet or jotting notes on clipboard, trying to capture their spoken words and maintain connection with them. It’s not that the tools are wrong.  

Many organizations have already moved to digital rounding workflows. But even with the right system in place, the act of documenting still competes with the act of listening. 

Listening well and documenting well at the same time is difficult. 

But one of them usually wins, and on a busy shift, it’s rarely the listening. What we lose isn’t just detail; it’s the offhand comment about last night’s shift, or the pattern you’d have spotted if the screen hadn’t needed you more than the person did.  

We decided that was unacceptable. 

NRC Health just launched something we’ve been perfecting with our health system partners: ambient listening with agentic AI for leader rounding, built on Huey™, our AI engine designed specifically for Human Understanding® in healthcare. 

This builds on the digital rounding workflows many organizations already have in place, making it easier to capture more of what’s already happening without changing how leaders round. 

You tap once. You have a real conversation. The AI listens, organizes what it hears into themes, and prepares ready-to-review documentation in the background. And you never have to break eye contact. 

No clipboards. No panicked typing. No speeding back to the nurses’ station, trying to remember what room 412 said about the overnight shift. 

Just you, the person in front of you, and a conversation that truly feels like a real conversation. 

Healthcare leaders are stretched. You’re expected to improve the patient experience, coach your teams, recognize great work, document everything for reporting, and somehow also stay human through it all.  

You want to be present with the people in front of you. You also want to walk away with useful data. Those two objectives have been fighting each other for years. 

“Healthcare leaders are under immense pressure to improve experience, quality, and outcomes, but they’re overwhelmed,” said Trent Green, CEO of NRC Health. “AI should take work off their plates, not add to it. Because we’ve focused exclusively on healthcare for more than 45 years, we’ve designed these capabilities to enable leaders, keeping them present with patients and staff while documentation and reporting happen in the background.” 

That last part is the whole point. AI isn’t here to replace the human moments—it’s here to protect them.

We expected ambient listening to make documentation easier. What we didn’t expect was how much it would change the quality and consistency of what gets captured. 

Leaders walked away with roughly 60 times more written detail from their rounds, and the rounds themselves weren’t any longer. Same chair, same amount of time, dramatically more to show for it. 

But the more important shift wasn’t just in volume—it was in consistency. Rounds that used ambient listening now produced complete, context-rich documentation 90% of the time, meaning the documentation from a shift reads less like a grocery list and more like something a colleague could pick up and use. We also saw that organizations are consistently identifying operational issues in real time with patient concerns captured in approximately one out of every four rounds, 

Here’s a look at the old version compared to the new version. 

Old version of the note: “pt cold”—scribbled at 2 p.m., clipped, and missing the pieces that mattered. 

New version: “The patient has been cold overnight for 2 nights in a row; it seemed she didn’t want to mention it because the team was busy. The next step is to check the room temperature, bring her an extra blanket before she has to ask again, and let her know the call light is available for times like this.” 

Both technically say something. Only one of them helps you do something about it. 

At Parkview Health, a 15-hospital system serving Indiana and northwest Ohio, nurse leaders are already rounding with ambient listening. 

“We just pull up a chair, set the phone down, and have our conversations with our patients, and it has been wonderful,” said Julie Parrett, Assistant Manager at Parkview Hospital Randallia. “It’s so much more efficient, and it’s capturing things we wouldn’t have remembered or had time to document before.” 

Sit with that last line for a second. Think about how many insights have evaporated over the years because a leader was busy, tired, or had three more rooms to get to before a huddle. All that information, gone. Now it stays. 

At UofL Health, a fully integrated academic health system delivering patient-centered care across a network of hospitals and clinical sites, has been exploring new ways to better understand the patient experience during leader rounding. 

And at Phelps Health, a south-central Missouri health system, rounds using ambient listening captured five times more comment data, with AI generating roughly five to six minutes of documentation per interaction on the rounder’s behalf. 

“It’s enhancing the insight we’re able to capture and creating more opportunities for our rounding to have greater impact,” said Emily Marie Jones, Director of Patient Experience at Phelps Health. “Over time, it will help us recognize patterns—like when a patient regularly feels cold or needs something specific—so we can better anticipate those needs and personalize their experience.”

That’s the shift, right there. From reactive to anticipatory. From collecting data to actually using it. From rounding as a checklist to rounding as a relationship. 

For a long time, measuring patient experience and employee experience has been a rearview-mirror activity. We survey. We analyze. We report. We try to improve. We repeat. With ambient listening, that’s set to change. 

“This represents a shift from measuring experience after the fact to understanding it as it’s happening,” said Helen Hrdy, COO at NRC Health. “Instead of asking healthcare teams to do more administrative work, we’re using technology to quietly support them, capturing insight automatically so leaders can focus on care, coaching, and connection.” 

The goal isn’t a prettier dashboard. The goal is a culture where people are listened to the first time, patients, staff, everyone. 

The Human Part Is Still the Point 

This isn’t AI for the sake of AI. It’s not a feature we’re bolting on because it sounded impressive in a pitch deck. Huey™ was purpose-built for the sensitivity and regulatory realities of healthcare, so sentiment and context are interpreted responsibly. 

We designed ambient listening so leaders can simply have a conversation and stay focused on the person in front of them, while AI captures the details in the background. Rather than adding work, we’re shifting time away from manual documentation and back into meaningful connection. 

Because here’s what we’ve learned after more than 45 years in healthcare: the quality of your follow-through is only as good as the quality of your listening. And your listening is only as good as your ability to be fully present. 

We built this so leaders could be fully present again. 

Leader rounding is the first application of this AI enablement. But it won’t be the last. We’re bringing Huey™ into more of the moments that change the unit’s day and more of the moments that matter most for patients.  

If you’re a healthcare leader who’s ever finished a round and thought, I know I heard something important in there, but I can’t quite put my finger on it, this is for you. 

If you’re a COO staring at patient experience data that feels three steps removed from what’s happening on your units, this is for you. 

If you’re a nurse leader who got into this work to take care of people and ended up spending half your day taking care of forms, this is especially for you. 

Set the phone down. Pull up a chair. Have a conversation. 

We’ll take care of the rest. 

Curious what ambient listening could look like on your rounds? Get in touch—we’d love to show you.