Artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly making its way into many professions, from personal training to marketing. It shows special promise in health care, but experts say buy-in from nurses and other clinical professionals is key.
While AI has the potential to make work easier in many ways, many in health care — and other industries — worry about being replaced by the latest technology. But a recent article from Med Page Today argues that the risk to job security is far outweighed by the potential benefits of AI, and encouraged nurses to embrace the coming changes.
“For the bedside clinicians, I think it’s important for them to recognize that artificial intelligence is not some type of magic that just happens in ‘the cloud,’” said Gregg Springan, MSN, BSN, vice president of clinical services and a nurse executive for Diligent Robotics, during a panel at the American Academy of Nursing 2023 Health Policy Conference.
According to Springan and others on the panel, using robots and AI is key to helping “empower patient care” and is not likely to push human nurses out of the picture.
Using a tool that helps provide a detailed response can benefit healthcare professionals and their teams. “Nursing schools already use the chatbot to create mock simulations that resemble real-life nurse/patient interactions,” noted Nurse Journal.
“It can create advanced health insights using AI tools that were not possible in the paper-based world,” added Tiffany Kelley, Ph.D.
According to IBM “AI provides opportunities to help reduce human error, assist medical professionals and staff, and provide patient services 24/7. As AI tools continue to develop, there is potential to use AI even more in reading medical images, X-rays and scans, diagnosing medical problems and creating treatment plans.″
“We are at a moment where you either start to use AI in your clinical practice, or you’re going to get left behind,” Springan concluded.
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