The Ottawa Hospital uses DAX Copilot to enhance the patient-clinician relationship

The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) delivers compassionate, world-class care to over 1.2 million people across Eastern Ontario, Western Quebec, and Nunavut. Across multiple campuses, the hospital is passionate about its extensive teaching and research work to provide what their patients need to improve their lives.

With so many patients under its care, TOH relies on over 13,000 staff, including more than 5,000 nurses and 2,700 physicians and residents. And like all healthcare workers, the hospital’s expansive team was put under immense pressure during the pandemic. This shone a spotlight on familiar challenges of recent years: growing administrative workloads and increasing levels of clinician burnout. Clinicians across TOH’s three hospital campuses and multiple satellite sites described the high mental load as a significant detractor to their work-life balance and satisfaction—and they wanted to be able to connect with their patients the way they were trained to.

“People’s resiliency is what allowed hospitals to continue providing excellent care during the pandemic. We wanted to tackle one of the challenges that puts those people under pressure,” says Mathieu LeBreton, Digital Experience Lead at The Ottawa Hospital. “These people didn’t go into healthcare just to chart—it’s so important to document your encounters and interventions, but that comes at a cost: increased workloads.”

A solution to break down the barrier between busy clinicians and their patients

As longtime users of Dragon Medical One, many of TOH’s clinicians had already tailored their own, more efficient workflows for documenting patient visits with the speech recognition solution. But as their workloads continued to grow, the hospital’s Digital Experience team saw an opportunity to do more to support them.

With hands-on charting, clinicians must either type up notes during the encounter, or document retrospectively between appointments. In a busy clinic, both can have their drawbacks. Typing can put a barrier between clinicians and their patients during vital conversations, while post-encounter documenting often leads to after-hours work and risks important details being lost.

That challenge brought the team to DAX Copilot, an AI assistant for clinical workflows and part of Microsoft for Healthcare, whose ambient listening capabilities are part of Microsoft Dragon Copilot. Its ambient documentation capabilities automatically capture notes based on the clinician and patient’s conversation—without the need for typing or focusing on populating EHR fields.

“When we set out on this project, it wasn’t about implementing a specific product,” explains LeBreton. “We needed to find the right solution to a really specific problem: giving clinicians that human interaction back and relieving their cognitive burden. DAX Copilot can help us achieve both.”

Seamless EHR integration cuts the learning curve

AI assistants for healthcare are a rapidly evolving part of the industry, so TOH did its due diligence to explore the landscape and the solutions available. But the hospital’s existing relationship with Microsoft, combined with AI capabilities, and an integration-focused approach, helped the Digital Experience team select DAX Copilot.

“The integration with our Epic EHR was the cornerstone of our decision to adopt DAX Copilot,” says LeBreton. “Our goal is actually to decrease our digital footprint and optimize our digital eco-system already in place.” DAX Copilot is embedded with Epic across the care continuum, including native integration for efficient, accurate documentation directly into the EHR. Clinicians can follow familiar workflows without the need for extra logins or additional steps, cutting down on the learning curve of a new tool. Alongside TOH’s other Microsoft solutions, which include Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Copilot, this helps shift the hospital toward a more integrated tech stack.

“From our clinicians’ point of view, the integration with Epic is key to improve workflows,” LeBreton continues. “They’re already dealing with so many things during the day—adding a completely separate system for them to learn would just add to the burden.”

Champions and change management deliver maximum benefits

When the TOH team started planning its DAX Copilot implementation, careful change management was top of the agenda. The adoption needed to be seamless, with support in place to make sure everyone could extract maximum benefit from their new workflows.

“We started with 70 clinicians across Ambulatory Care, specialty clinics, and the Emergency Department,” explains Emilie Valiquette, Digital Experience Project Manager at The Ottawa Hospital. “We selected clinicians based on their willingness to try a new technology and onboarded them in three phases.”

The Digital Experience team and Microsoft organized virtual and in-person sessions for group and one-on-one assistance, plus custom training for TOH’s systems. “We also set up regular peer-to-peer meetings where our team could present data and then just let the clinicians speak their language together,” says LeBreton. “It was great to watch them solve each other’s challenges—and when we saw a collective gap, we could bring Microsoft in for specific support.”

These bi-monthly check-ins helped the Digital Experience team guide and evaluate the implementation, using quality improvement methodology as well as foster a community where the clinicians could collaborate and share best practices. This kept engagement high throughout the whole process and ensured everyone reaped the benefits of more simple documentation workflows.

A more compassionate experience for patients

Since DAX Copilot went live, both clinicians and patients report higher levels of satisfaction in their interactions*—and it’s even freeing up time to care for more people.

“DAX Copilot has allowed me to focus more on patient care and less on paperwork—I’m seeing and treating more patients,” says Dr. Haroun Zayed, an emergency physician at The Ottawa Hospital. With an average of seven minutes saved per encounter, TOH’s Emergency Department physicians can now see an average of two additional patients per shift*, providing the care they need faster.

According to patient satisfaction scores*, the overall rating for care consistently increased by at least 2% when the clinician uses DAX Copilot. Nearly all (98%) of patients say their encounters are as good as or better than their previous experiences, and more report feeling like they had their clinician’s full attention during the conversation. This is vital to build trust and lead patients toward better outcomes. They no longer feel like there’s a screen or a keyboard between them and their healthcare provider­—opening up the potential for a stronger connection.

A better working life for clinicians

With DAX Copilot in their workflow, TOH’s clinicians now spend less time notetaking, while preserving the quality and detail of patient records. On top of relieving some of their cognitive load, surveyed respondents noted a 70% reduction* in burnout and fatigue, which helps them focus on what matters most: the person in front of them. “With DAX Copilot, I can spend more time on the aspects of medicine that I love: spending time with each patient, listening and focusing on their care needs, and connecting in a more human way,” explains Dr. Jim Yang, an emergency physician at The Ottawa Hospital.

Among the most advanced users, the efficiency improvements are especially significant. The team is now analyzing their workflows to extract data on TOH’s return on investment and best practices for using DAX Copilot, to give more clinicians the chance to rebalance their work and home lives. Each month, the team collates data from DAX Copilot and Epic alongside feedback from clinicians and patients into a Microsoft Power BI dashboard to review progress. “Initially I was skeptical, because I was already very efficient using templates and smartphrases,” says Dr. Amel Arnaout, an endocrinologist at The Ottawa Hospital. “But DAX Copilot made my notes even better and I was faster at closing my encounters with less editing after.”

Following this success, the Digital Experience team is now extending the trial to 200 users, including more emergency and ambulatory care clinicians and regional partners. “We’ve had such high engagement from our trial users­—we want to continue that as we expand with DAX Copilot,” says Valiquette. “There are so many more opportunities ahead.”

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Explore how to streamline documentation, surface information, and automate tasks with Microsoft Dragon Copilot.

*Microsoft survey of DAX Copilot users across their facilities, Spring 2025.