Nurse Kaycee Here

AI, or Artificial Intelligence is a HOT topic right now. Especially in healthcare. The University of Illinois Chicago has an excellent definition of AI:

“Artificial intelligence (AI) works by simulating human intelligence through the use of algorithms, data, and computational power. The goal is to enable machines or software to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and language understanding.”

We all know that nurses are facing an increase in items they must complete and care tasks they must do during their shift.

-Rounding, hourly assessments, passing medications, wound care, lab draws, measuring intake & output, ambulating patients, not to mention all the charting that must get done, because if you didn’t chart it, it didn’t happen!-

All the while, most of them are doing it short staffed or with high acuity assignments. It is getting increasingly difficult to keep up with everything that needs to be done in an 8- or 12-hour long shift.

As the responsibility of nurses increases, AI is helping transform nursing practices to help alleviate some of the stress. Here are some of the interesting ways that AI is helping nurses:

• Most hospitals are now using Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) for patient charting. Many EMRs are programmed to use AI. For example, one hospital I worked at used AI to predict sepsis. The AI tool would gather information such as vital signs, intake and output, and lab values. If a combination of this data recognized sepsis, the AI tool would alert you when you open a patient’s chart with a pop-up. The pop-up would come on the screen asking you to act as this patient is at high risk for sepsis. You could then use your nursing judgment to decide what intervention is best suited for the patient.

• AI has the potential to give nurses report on patients. AI can be programmed to assess a patient’s chart from the previous shift and provide an accurate report or SBAR report based on the data that was charted during that shift. This of course assumes the previous shifts were able to correctly document what happened. Sometimes we miss documenting things, and this could have a great effect on AI reports.

• AI is helping sort through resumes. I remember during one of my clinical rotations in a large health system I was following a nurse supervisor and we were going through resumes together. She told me there could be over 80 applicants for one nursing job. In this case, AI was used to sort through resumes that potentially did not meet the qualifications of the job description. AI would specifically target certain keywords on resumes and recommend the top applicants based on those keywords. The use of AI helped save hours of looking through resumes that did not meet the job criteria.

• AI can assist patients in scheduling appointments, refilling prescriptions, and help with data entry using automation.

• AI is assisting in medical research studies. Check out this ongoing study where AI was used to help identify compounds that have the potential to fight against MRSA. They were able to use AI to narrow down two compounds that are being tested in mice. The compounds “reduced the MRSA population by a factor of ten”. This is just one way AI is assisting nurses and healthcare researchers in medical innovations.

These are just a few of the ways that AI has innovated and continues to innovate healthcare practices for nurses and the healthcare teams. AI is going to continue to grow and become a larger part of nursing practices. The hope is that artificial intelligence can streamline practices so nurses can spend more time focusing on patient needs and care. I am interested to see how it affects nursing care in the coming years.

What are some ways you interact with AI at your healthcare job?