Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a hot topic in healthcare. However, there’s a noticeable gap in understanding (a) what GenAI is and isn’t and (b) its best use cases.
How can we implement this technology effectively when we don’t fully grasp what it is or how to use it? Indeed, the growing excitement about GenAI’s potential to improve access to care and reduce clinician burnout is sometimes tempered by an underlying lack of trust regarding how this technology will be utilized in the clinical realm.
To truly harness the potential of GenAI in nursing, proper training and integration are essential. Nurses need the skills to not only use AI tools effectively but also to understand their capabilities and limitations. And taking a step back, we cannot expect healthcare providers to embrace new products or successfully integrate them into workflows without taking the time to understand their needs and involving them in the product development process. Collaborating with nurses as partners in tech development and ensuring that they are present at the decision-making tables will lead to stronger products and a more sustainable impact on patient care and clinician workloads.
Ongoing education and collaboration between tech and healthcare professionals are key to ensuring that GenAI complements and amplifies the work of clinicians.
The Symbiotic Relationship
GenAI is a technology that powers many applications. One application is healthcare agents that can serve as an ally and force multiplier to nurses in care delivery. Understanding and integrating this technology can help us:
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Reduce Clinician Burden: GenAI healthcare agents can simplify tasks such as scheduling, education, and follow-up calls. Using agents to assist with these more administrative tasks allows nurses to spend more time interacting with, understanding, and caring for patients. As the demands on staff continue to grow, products that reduce administrative burdens in clinicians’ workflows are critical.
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Increase Access to Care & Improve Disease Detection: GenAI healthcare agents have the potential to reach more patients with a frequency that has never been possible. Not only are we able to use this technology to increase the number of patients we make contact with, we can increase the frequency of touchpoints. We can also communicate with patients in their preferred language at the time of day (or night!) that is most convenient. Nurses can use the insights gathered on these calls to proactively manage patient care, adjusting treatment plans based on up-to-date information. This proactive approach can significantly improve patient outcomes, move them out of acute care facilities and back into their communities, and reduce hospital readmissions.
Respecting Clinical Boundaries
Notably, we do not believe GenAi healthcare agents are yet appropriate for diagnosis or creating care plans; these tasks are the job of the clinician. The GenAI healthcare agent can help collect information to inform the clinician’s analysis, communicate the clinician’s decisions back to the patient, and track the patient’s adherence to the clinician’s decisions. GenAI agents also have specific boundaries beyond which they should automatically and seamlessly hand off a patient engagement to a human clinician.
Addressing Concerns about Generative AI
Despite its potential benefits, some nurses and clinicians have expressed skepticism about adopting GenAI. It’s not that they resist innovations aimed at making their jobs easier; it’s that previous experiences with technology have sometimes resulted in increased chaos and heavier workloads instead of relief. In addition to general hesitance around new tech innovations, the impact of GenAI on patient safety and job displacement continues to be a topic of conversation.
However, we must not allow fear and misunderstanding to obstruct our path to solutions that could transform patient care and ease the burdens faced by nurses and clinical leaders. The unique humanity that nurses bring to their patients during their most vulnerable moments is irreplaceable. Rather than replacing clinicians, healthcare agents powered by GenAI have the potential to augment clinician roles, fostering a collaborative relationship that benefits both patients and healthcare professionals.
Real-World Implementation
It’s often hard for clinicians to comprehend the capabilities of this technology. Traditionally, nursing education has focused on clinical skills and patient care; training on understanding and implementing technology is usually secondary. They have also functioned in an environment of scarcity for so long that it is challenging to step outside this realm and imagine what healthcare could look like in an age of abundance. What could we achieve if we expanded our ideas of what a healthcare team looks like to include GenAI healthcare agents?
For example, consider pre- and post-operative calls. Currently, most are completed by nurses during their shifts, where distractions and full patient loads make it challenging to engage thoroughly. Discharge and follow-up calls to check in on patients may not even occur due to staffing shortages. With GenAI healthcare agents, we can remove this task from nursing and conduct these check-ins at convenient times for patients, explicitly tailored to their conditions and history. These care agents can hold conversations with patients for as long as needed, repeating education and ensuring understanding of the care plan. While the idea of a patient interacting with an AI agent might seem strange, we have seen cases where patients stay on the line for 20-30 minutes! This prompts us to ask: if we had all the time in the world with patients, what could care really look like?
Do No Harm
A primary concern surrounding this technology revolves around safety: can we trust it to interact with patients in a way that doesn’t cause harm?
Safety has been at the core of our work as we design and train our GenAI healthcare agents. As Chief Nursing Officer, a significant portion of my day involves collaborating with our clinical and engineering teams to ensure our product lives up to our mission statement of “do no harm.” Additionally, our dedicated team of nurses conducts daily safety checks and evaluates transcripts and test calls to ensure new features are implemented appropriately. A unique aspect of our work at Hippocratic is that nurses are involved at every step in our process. When it comes to creating use cases, testing, evaluating, and supervising our GenAI healthcare agents, nurses lead these efforts, using their clinical expertise to ensure that this technology is fit for patient care. Who better to help create a tool that augments nursing care than nurses?
Moving Forward
Generative AI is poised to revolutionize healthcare, providing nurses with new tools to enhance patient care. By integrating AI into our workflows, we can improve decision-making and streamline processes, ultimately making care more personalized and accessible.As advocates for safe patient care, nurses are uniquely positioned to lead this transformation. Our role should not be to act as a barrier to technology implementation but to advocate for safe patient care in collaboration with these advancements.
Generative AI is set to write a new chapter in healthcare, creating a world where care is more personalized and accessible. I’ve always found nurses to be the MacGyvers of healthcare—resourceful and innovative. As we stand on the brink of this technological revolution, these skills will be more crucial than ever. Embracing generative AI allows us to redefine the nursing landscape, enhancing not only our workflows but also the quality of care we provide.
As we move forward, fostering a culture of collaboration between nurses, tech developers, and healthcare leaders will be essential. This partnership will ensure that AI tools are designed with clinical input, prioritizing patient safety and care quality.
By understanding and ultimately embracing these innovations, we can transform skepticism into empowerment, positioning ourselves as leaders in this conversation. Together, we can leverage generative AI to create a healthcare system that is not only efficient but also deeply compassionate and responsive to patient needs. Let’s seize this opportunity to bridge the gap between technology and patient care, ensuring that we not only keep pace with change but drive it forward.