Just like in other industries, AI has the potential to reshape healthcare as well. To understand where and how AI can help, it is key to hear from those on the frontlines of patient care: nurses. Overall, nurses are cautiously enthusiastic, note senior partner Gretchen Berlin and colleagues. About two-thirds of nurses who responded to a survey say AI could be very helpful across nine possible applications and more than two-thirds point to at least some opportunity to improve patient care or case workload. However, they also express concern about maintaining care quality, with 38 percent seeing the greatest risk in using AI for clinical diagnoses and decisions.
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An interactive bar chart over 2 panels presents data from a survey of 5,033 US nurses on their opinions about AI across 8 clinical applications: patient education, enhancing medication management, clinical education, improving diagnosis accuracy and clinical decision support, eliminating tasks to increase job satisfaction, improving productivity, streamlining administrative tasks, and synthesizing progress notes and medical records.
The first panel displays responses for “familiarity” and “helpfulness,” and the second panel for “improving patient care or workload” and “risk for patient care.” Each section uses stacked horizontal bars to represent the percentage of nurses who rate AI’s impact on a 10-point Likert scale, with the following categorizations: “very” (7–10 points), “somewhat” (4–6), or “not at all” (1–3).
Respondents expressed the most familiarity with AI applications for patient education and enhancing medication management, with 37% of nurses reporting “very familiar” ratings. In contrast, synthesizing progress notes and medical records received the highest percentage of nurses (41%) reporting that they were “not at all” familiar with AI applications in that area. Helpfulness ratings are consistently high across all 8 applications, with “very helpful” ratings ranging from 63% (synthesizing progress notes and medical records) to 70% (enhancing medication management and eliminating tasks to increase job satisfaction).
74% of nurses report that AI is “very helpful” with improving patient care or workload for enhancing medication management, while only 68% feel the same about care and workload improvements for synthesizing progress notes and medical records. The share of nurses who rated the impact of AI as “very risky” ranged from 18% (improving productivity) to 38% (improving diagnosis accuracy and clinical decision support).
Source: American Nurses Foundation Nurses Survey, March 2024.
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To read the article, see “The pulse of nurses’ perspectives on AI in healthcare delivery,” October 1, 2024.