HEALTHTECH: How can AI improve nursing workflows?
BARR: AI can reduce documentation and cognitive burden for routine tasks, the things they do the same way every day. We can automate some of that so that nurses can spend more time with their patients. AI can also summarize information for them, saving them time and preventing them from having to look through the chart to find what they need. This helps them complete their assessments with fewer clicks.
If we can save them clicks, we’re going to make them happier. In clinical care, it’s about giving nurses more time to focus on their patients. But we also have an opportunity to improve our nursing leaders’ workloads when we use AI to help with scheduling, staffing and other administrative tasks.
HEALTHTECH: How can healthcare organizations best prepare nurses for AI implementation?
BARR: The biggest thing is that we have to involve the nurses in our design. We like to say, “Nothing for them without them,” because their input on our work is important. We must let them tell us what’s going to work within their workflow. We also need to inform them of what AI does and what it doesn’t do, so we can build their trust. That’s going to help with adoption. We also have to understand that most AI involves a practice change. That’s much more significant than the technology itself. Rather than telling them that we’re giving them this technology, we need to help them understand that if they change their practice, this technology will help them save time and make their life easier.
HEALTHTECH: How can organizations determine which clinician-facing AI tools to prioritize?
BARR: I believe, and I think our organization believes, that whatever AI we bring into our organization should be AI that we’ve identified to solve an existing problem. We’re not implementing AI for its own sake; instead, we’re looking at a problem, such as scheduling for the nurse manager. That’s a problem we need to solve. What AI can we use to solve it?
We also have a rigorous governance process called FAIR-AI (Framework for the Appropriate Implementation and Review of Artificial Intelligence) to make sure we’re adopting safe, practical, nonbiased and transparent AI. We also have to ensure that we’re choosing appropriate workflows in which to implement AI. You don’t want to automate something that might be a bad process.
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HEALTHTECH: How do you see AI changing the nursing role over the next few years? How has it impacted your own role so far?
BARR: We know that AI is not going to replace clinical judgment or nursing judgment. We think that it will shift time away from documentation and those administrative tasks that we were talking about earlier, so that nurses can do the things that nurses want to do: take care of patients. So, we want to support them and their teams. We want to help with clinical decision-making however we can.
Historically, nursing in particular and healthcare more broadly have been slow to adopt new technology. Today, AI is evolving so rapidly, we need to adapt more quickly and prepare our clinicians for that change. That means making sure our leaders have an adaptive style to help manage through the change. That’s more important now than ever.
That’s what I've seen in my own role. The role of my clinical informatics team is changing. Not only are we being asked to look at more complex problems with more complex technology, we’re also being asked to support in a different way, because our clinicians need a different level of support with the new technology.
HEALTHTECH: Why did Advocate Health decide to implement ambient AI documentation?
BARR: Advocate Health was one of the first organizations to use ambient listening for physician documentation, so that set us up nicely to be able to partner with a vendor to use it for nursing too. In the early days, I always asked, “Where’s nursing in this? When are we going to have something for nursing?” So, we wanted to be at the forefront of that and the existing relationships from the physician work, I think, made that a little bit easier.
It’s also exciting for me, and I think for the organization, to be able to shape documentation for nursing. We know that nursing documentation is very different from physician documentation. It’s a whole new world.
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