What Role Does AI Play in Nursing?

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The role of artificial intelligence (AI) has become quite common in everyday life.

Whether it’s scrolling though a phone, working on a computer at school or work, a thermostat in a home, and even when you visit the doctor.

Nurse.org has introduced Nurse AI Watch, ongoing tracker of how artificial intelligence is actually being used in nursing.

“We follow the tools, the systems deploying them, the safety questions, the union contracts, and the oversight gap, and we update it as the picture changes,” according to the Nurse.org website.

Let’s dive deeper into what this means and what AI and nursing can look like in the future.

What Does AI in Nursing Look Like Today?

Artificial intelligence in nursing can mean many things.

“With the ability to analyze vast amounts of data in a very short time, AI has the potential to transform healthcare, especially when used correctly,” according to the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences (USAHS).

Today, AI is used for :

• Ambient documentation, akin to dictation, which includes AI “scribes” that listen to a patient encounter and draft the note that gets reviewed and approved.
• Clinical support tools. For example, some AI flags a risk or suggests a next step — a sepsis alert, a fall-risk score, a deterioration warning pushed to your screen.
• Virtual nursing, by using remote nurses and AI tools to handle admissions, discharges, and monitoring from a screen in the hospital room.
• Administrative AI assists with scheduling, staffing, billing.

“With the help of AI in nursing, nurses can spend more time focusing on complex patient cases and have more information at their disposal to monitor and care for their patients,” USAHS states.

Barries to AI in Nursing

It’s clear there are some challenges to having AI in nursing.

In fact, the  Emergency Care Research Institute ECRI named AI as the number 1 health technology hazard.

Errors like biases, under-documentation, and other mistakes have been reported.

“Peer-reviewed work in [Journal of Medical Internet Research] examining ambient AI scribes found that roughly 70% of AI-generated notes contained at least one error — omissions, additions, or details that were never said,” Nurse.org states.

AI aims to reduce documentation work, get information quick, and allow clinicians to spend more meaningful time with patients, but it’s clear human oversight is necessary.

“The lesson isn’t “AI is useless” — it’s that the human review step is doing real safety work, and it can’t be rushed,” according to Nurse.org.

Looking to the Future

In some states, lawmakers are taking action.

“California’s AB 489 and Nevada’s AB 406 are enacted laws addressing AI and clinical scope, and Arizona’s HB 4080 has been introduced,” according to Nurse.org.

In fact, Nursing AI Watch tracks 67 AI-related measures across 39 jurisdictions (38 states plus the federal government).

When it comes to AI taking over nursing positions, the data is unclear.

“What we can say is that the mix of AI capability, hospital budget strain, and virtual-nursing models is exactly the kind of pressure worth tracking,” according to the AI Watch.

Go here for the complete AI Watch Analysis.

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