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Microsoft and Andor Health think so, and point towards early wins with ThinkAndor® X Sentara Health at the Think AI Conference.
The modern hospital is facing a structural crisis: rising patient demand, shrinking clinical capacity, and care environments that feel increasingly strained for both patients and staff. Across the U.S., health systems continue to report longer wait times, higher levels of clinician burnout, and widening gaps in available nursing hours. Industry groups have noted significant workforce departures in recent years, alongside increased pressure from broader public-health challenges such as behavioral-health needs, chronic-disease complexity, and uneven resource distribution between regions.
As hospitals search for practical ways to stabilize operations, many are turning toward technology — particularly AI-enabled tools — to help manage documentation workloads, streamline care coordination, and extend the reach of clinical teams. The trend represents an emerging shift: rather than viewing AI as a replacement for clinical labor, more health systems are exploring how virtual support models and ambient technology can supplement existing staff and ease operational bottlenecks.
Within that landscape, platforms like ThinkAndor® from Andor Health have begun to gain attention for their role in virtual nursing programs and workflow augmentation.
Developed under the leadership of Raj Toleti, the company has focused on creating tools that aim to support nursing teams by reducing administrative load, extracting information from electronic medical records, and enabling real-time documentation through voice and natural-language interfaces. According to the company, these features are intended to help health systems address staffing strain while maintaining continuity of patient monitoring.
One example comes from Sentara Health, one of the country’s largest not-for-profit integrated health systems, which signed an expanded agreement to license of ThinkAndor® earlier this year.
Sentara’s goal, according to both organizations, was to build virtual-care capability across 12 hospitals and approximately 34,000 employees. Andor Health’s operations and product teams, including COO Pritesh and Chief Product Officer Srini Surendranath, collaborated with Sentara to align the technology with each facility’s workflows and infrastructure.
Since implementation, Sentara reports that the platform has supported more than 44,000 virtual nursing sessions and contributed over 11,000 hours of virtual assistance for frontline teams. The system has also reported operational improvements such as increased early-day discharge rates, with nearly 18% of system-wide discharges occurring before 1 p.m. While these outcomes are specific to Sentara and still in the early stages of evaluation, they reflect a growing interest among hospital leaders in the potential of AI-enabled virtual nursing models.
Sentara has also indicated that the initiative with ThinkAndor® has helped activate 1,742 beds system-wide and returned thousands of nursing hours to staff, figures the organization attributes to a combination of workflow redesign and the virtual-care layer. Though early, the partnership is being watched by other health systems as a case study in how digital tools might be deployed to support workforce stabilization.
These themes will be central at the upcoming ThinkAI conference, held November 16–19 in Orlando, where hospital executives, virtual nursing leaders, developers, and AI researchers will gather to discuss the role of agentic and ambient systems in addressing capacity challenges. Sessions will explore findings from early adopters, including the Sentara implementation, and examine how health systems are attempting to integrate AI in ways that improve coordination, reduce documentation friction, and expand the effective reach of clinical teams.
As health systems confront one of the most challenging operational periods in recent history, the sector appears to be entering a new phase of experimentation. This phase is one in which AI is treated not as a futuristic concept, but as a set of tools that may help reinforce the foundation of day-to-day care. The question now is how these early models can be scaled, standardized, and evaluated as hospitals continue searching for solutions to today’s patient-care crisis.
