A new tool, Zoom Workplace for Frontline, is now generally available to all customers. It uses agentic artificial intelligence to help improve on-shift communications and work management, the telehealth company said Wednesday.
WHY IT MATTERS
With a real-time activity feed, as well as auto-generated on-shift chat groups and push-to-talk functionality, Zoom said Wednesday in its announcement that it aims to boost productivity, collaboration and connection among frontline teams in several industries.
For healthcare workers, Zoom’s new agentic AI-driven application is about enhancing communications collaboration within a shift, as Ritu Mukherjee, Zoom’s head of product, business acceleration and readiness, explained at the HIMSS25 global conference and exhibition in March.
In addition, the mobile application features tools for managers to improve shift swapping and task management and will serve up shift summaries.
“It’s going to be focused on your shifts, and your schedules and how to get work done within a shift,” Mukherjee told Healthcare IT News.
While health systems and hospitals may rely on existing workforce management software or platforms to help frontline managers make staffing and scheduling decisions across shifts, the app provides the frontline workers and their managers with their schedules and connects team members when working.
“It automatically creates a team chat group for you so that you can communicate collaboratively within your shift,” said Mukherjee.
The app’s AI-based summarizations can also help managers review what work has already been done ahead of each shift.
“What we heard is that shift handoffs can also be very time-consuming,” she said.
While Zoom Workplace for Frontline does not architect shift workloads or give opinions on any additional staff that may be needed, it can integrate with various workforce and scheduling management platforms, she added.
THE LARGER TREND
In January, Zoom announced that AI developer Suki joined the company’s portfolio of AI investments to further integrate more AI tools into its clinical workflow platform.
Previously, Zoom engaged with the Suki generative AI platform to enable providers at approximately 140,000 healthcare organization customers using its video communications platform for telehealth to seamlessly generate clinical notes after a patient visit.
“Video will be a critical interface in the AI-driven world,” Suki CEO Punit Soni said when the companies announced their initial collaboration last year.
Then at HIMSS25, Zoom launched a public beta of its ambient notes capabilities in its Workplace for Clinicians product.
“We are thrilled to work with Zoom to develop new interaction models and AI that will advance our mission of making healthcare technology invisible and assistive so clinicians can focus on what’s most important: their patients,” Soni said in a statement.
Taking steps to achieve agentic AI across its products is a natural progression, according to Zoom’s product developers.
For example, after a clinician reviews a note, “With the press of a button, you just send it to the [electronic health record] system,” Mukherjee said. “This is just the starting point in automating the clinical workflow.”
“A lot of our Zoom products have historically been for information workers,” she added. “Now we are also looking at digitizing those workflows for people who are not sitting at a desk. We have created a very simple [user interface] and mobile app experience,” she said of coming applications featuring AI enhancements.
ON THE RECORD
“Our mission of delivering an AI-first open work platform isn’t just limited to knowledge workers; we’re also thinking about how we can address the needs of frontline workers, who represent over 80% of the global workforce,” Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, said in a statement.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
