The future is already here: artificial intelligence in nursing is a growing trend

Amy Hemsley, MSN, RN, associate director of nursing at PMC, says the hospital has partnered with Care.ai to implement a virtual nursing solution powered by AI inference and in-room sensors. Reasoning is a clinical decision-making process that caregivers use to develop patient care plans.

PMC uses virtual nurses who work in the identical department in a separate room and use the care.ai platform to constantly monitor patients for potential risks. These nurses can alert bedside nurses to problems before they occur, allowing care teams to be more proactive and fewer reactive.

Hemsley says virtual nurses also can check on patients’ conditions via video calls. If the patient consents, the camera can be activated and a virtual nurse will appear on the TV within the room. Patients can opt out of using this feature.

“As we work to implement and refine the virtual nurse process, our bedside nurses are finding that they have additional availability to provide hands-on care, spend more time with patients and focus on improving the quality of care,” Hemsley said.

While artificial intelligence in nursing is nothing latest, the technology has grown in popularity, with more hospitals using artificial intelligence tools to enhance patient care and support nursing staff. However, artificial intelligence has also raised concerns amongst nurses and other health care staff that the technology could threaten patient safety and ultimately make some nursing jobs obsolete.

Hemsley says virtual nursing and AI-enabled PMC solutions help nursing staff provide high-quality patient care, but is not going to impact current staffing levels.

“Nursing is a complex role and will always involve tasks that require the personal presence of nurses at the bedside,” she said. “As with all the technologies we implement, our goal is to increase the role of nurses at the bedside.”

According to Hemsley, the AI ​​platform has been well received because it was first introduced in July. The hospital plans to slowly make the platform available to other departments.

Artificial intelligence in nursing personalizes patient care

Dr. Jung In Park, BSN, assistant professor on the University of California, Irvine, says the university is on the forefront of integrating computer science and artificial intelligence into each nursing research and education.

“Our faculty are increasingly incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into their research, which finds patterns in data and uses them to make decisions,” she said. “By leveraging large and complex data sets, we discover valuable insights that can improve the quality of nursing care and improve the interpretation of medical records, including nursing records.”

Park says the impact of artificial intelligence on health care is each broad and promising, especially in the case of its potential to enhance patient care.

He explains that artificial intelligence algorithms can analyze data points from a patient’s medical records, lifestyle and health indicators in real time. The data can then be used to predict a patient’s risk of developing diseases akin to diabetes and heart failure, enabling providers to work with patients on disease prevention and personalized treatment plans.

While acknowledging concerns that AI could replace nurses or threaten patient safety, Park says it is important to know AI’s limitations in replicating human knowledge.

“While AI may excel at sorting through big data, making predictions and even helping with diagnosis, it lacks the understanding of human emotions, ethical considerations and real-time adaptability that nurses have,” she said. “Nurses are often the first to notice subtle changes in a patient’s condition due to changes in behavior, appearance or verbal expression – elements that artificial intelligence cannot currently fully understand.”

Park acknowledges that AI technologies include their very own challenges and risks.

“Like any tool that accesses and processes patient data, AI systems are susceptible to data breaches if not properly secured,” Park said. “Moreover, algorithms can inherit biases present in the data they are trained on or from the humans who created them.”

As an example, he points out that if an algorithm is trained totally on data from a particular ethnic or age group, its predictions and proposals is probably not as accurate or fair for people outside that group.

“These concerns make it critical to incorporate artificial intelligence into healthcare, with particular attention paid to data security and ethical oversight,” Park said.

Artificial intelligence in nursing education

Nursing students are also beginning to learn AI technology in college – and for good reason. Park says that given the longer term of nursing and healthcare can be shaped by artificial intelligence, nursing students need to know how it really works and the way it might impact their nursing path.

“Our curriculum at the University of California, Irvine is tailored to equip students with the skills needed to successfully navigate these tools and use them in their future clinical practice,” Park said.

Starting this fall, nursing students on the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) will learn concerning the applications of artificial intelligence.

Yoshimi Fukuoka, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, a professor on the UCSF School of Nursing, developed the college’s artificial intelligence course with a colleague and says fear of artificial intelligence often stems from an incomplete understanding of the technology’s potential uses and risk mitigation methods.

In addition to a man-made intelligence course for nursing students, Fukuoka’s research focuses on the usage of artificial intelligence within the prevention of heart disease and kind 2 diabetes.

“I am building a fully automated, AI-powered text chatbot to provide women with educational resources about heart disease,” she said. The chatbot uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing and goals to mimic human conversation through text or voice interactions. Fukuoka lists Alexa and Siri as apps that use natural language processing.

“We know that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S., so our chatbot will provide resources tailored to the unique health information submitted by each user, covering topics such as risk factors, symptoms and when to call 911,” she said.

Fukuoka says that in a pilot project that recently tested the algorithm, participants, two-thirds of whom were from different backgrounds and ethnicities, reported being more knowledgeable about heart disease.

In response to the rising incidence of diabetes and obesity, Fukuoka and her colleagues are also working on a man-made intelligence-based intervention to create a predictive model that may personalize a patient’s weight reduction program. He says nurses can recommend AI-based interventions for each heart disease and diabetes/obesity as preventive measures to assist at-risk patients achieve higher health.

Going forward, as technology continues to evolve, it’s secure to say that nurses – and society – will see more examples of artificial intelligence in nursing. However, as with every other tool currently utilized in healthcare, it would be obligatory to closely monitor its implementation, safety and suitability over time.