Imagine clicking onto an employer-provided app to access a chatbot that will give you insights into and directions for the care of a complex patient or problem. You type in a carefully crafted question based on your experience with the patient, and "Voila!" in a few minutes you have a list of possibilities and strategies for intervening. Not all of them make sense and a few seem unrelated to the case; nevertheless, the bot's response has you thinking in different ways about the best care management approaches.
The past 60 years has seen extraordinary developments in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) defined as "the construction of computer programs to perform tasks currently performed more satisfactorily by humans because they require high-level mental processes such as perceptual learning, memory organization and critical thinking."1(p91) The chatbot analyzes patient data amassed by your health system and produces findings and problem-solving approaches based on your question-all at lightning speed. Your consultation with the bot is actually with thousands of health professionals and patients who contributed data to the system-a colossal collaboration.
AI is transforming health care in so many ways.2 It is revolutionizing and speeding diagnoses through the mining of radiologic images, blood test results, electrocardiograms, and genomic data. It is used to power microscopes to scan for harmful bacteria and can determine a patient's risk for myocardial infarction and point to the most appropriate preventive drugs. AI can provide personalized physical therapy programs and match individuals to the most suitable health provider for mental disorder intervention. In the work environment, AI can streamline repetitive health care tasks and improve the efficiency of patient flow in emergency departments.
Think about the impact of AI technologies in your own area of practice. Is your employing organization mining its patient data with the aim of delivering more effective care? Are you using AI technologies to streamline documentation requirements? Are telehealth visits archived and mined for themes and data that can improve care? And if you are a teacher of nursing, you can incorporate a tool like ChatGPT into a course to demonstrate how AI programs work, how its appropriate use can enhance student learning (but not write their papers), and how AI will integrate into most aspects of life in the future, especially health care.
If AI in health care is to realize its promise, there needs to be more comprehensive regulation of its use. We need to settle questions of privacy, data ownership, and access to broadband so that health AI can be deployed to all socioeconomic groups. Think about AI's current use in your health care system and practice? It is helping you to practice more effectively and realize better outcomes for your patients? Whether your response is "yes" or "no," you need to know why. Subscribe to Listservs that will keep you current like The Medical Futurist (https://medicalfuturist.com/).3 AI is catalyzing the rapid evolution of health care. Stay ahead of this digital tsunami.
-Gloria F. Donnelly, PhD, RN, FAAN, FCPP
Editor in Chief
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