Nurses are lining up to learn about AI. These are their top areas of excitement — and concern

We’re thick into conference season — and if there’s one topic on every agenda, it’s artificial intelligence, including generative AI.

AI featured prominently, of course, at the innovation conference HLTH, held last month in Las Vegas, but was no less top of mind when nurses gathered the following week in New Orleans for the American Nurses Association’s Magnet and Pathway to Excellence conference.?

You can sense the shift over the past few years: clinicians are warming to the technology in larger numbers and they’re increasingly eager to be part of its development.?

Here’s what people have been talking about over the past few weeks:?

Nurses are preparing for AI — whether they like it or not.

Let’s be clear: plenty of nurses are still skeptical about the technology. But they’re learning the ropes nonetheless.?

At the ANA conference, two events in particular stood out: a session on emerging technologies that attracted a large amount of interest as well as one that was more education-focused, covering topics like prompt engineering, or how to write queries that guide AI models.

“There was a lot of excitement and energy around the sessions,” said Oriana Beaudet, DNP RN FAAN , the ANA’s VP of innovation. “Nurses are leaning into this space; they’re not shying away from it.”

The majority of nurses — or 57% — are hopeful that AI will improve quality of care or at least their job satisfaction, according to a recent survey from 麦肯锡 and the American Nurses Foundation , which collected 7,200 responses in 2023. But 37% nonetheless have concerns about how AI will impact patient care, their workload and responsibilities, or even their job prospects.?

The ANA is trying to address these concerns too. “This is going to become routine practice moving forward over the next few years,” Beaudet said. “How do we make sure that our profession is aware of these emerging trends and our statements related to the ethical use of AI and nursing practice?”

Optimism is nevertheless increasing.

Perhaps the most telling takeaway from McKinsey’s survey is that 64% of respondents said they actually want more AI tools at work. And only 14% wanted fewer of them. The numbers held across different age groups, varying only a few percentage points in either direction, with mid-career nurses most eager for new AI-driven technology.?

That sentiment is up markedly from when LinkedIn surveyed nurses back in 2018. Opinions about AI were decidedly negative back then, with one in four saying it would have the greatest negative impact on patient care among all of the technologies they work with.?

But five years later, McKinsey’s survey found that nurses had higher hopes, with the vast majority of respondents saying it would be at least somewhat, if not very, helpful for use cases like medication management, patient education and eliminating tasks that reduce job satisfaction.?

“Nurses for the most part, across ages, are conversant in AI across their everyday lives and excited about its potential,” said Gretchen Berlin , a senior partner at McKinsey and a nurse herself. “We were pleasantly surprised by the relative optimism [compared with] some of the earlier public reports.”

Workflow matters.

Nurses in McKinsey’s survey saw the largest risks for AI when it comes to clinical issues, like using it for clinical decision support, identifying drug interactions, or synthesizing progress reports or notes.

Ambient listening, for example, is a technology that clinicians have been quick to adopt, but risks arise if they rely on it too much, said Dan Shoenthal , chief innovation officer at the MD Anderson Cancer Center .?

Another area of focus for MD Anderson is making sure that as more AI tools get introduced, there’s a process to manage any additional workload. For instance, when a hospital introduces a predictive model to calculate a patient’s fall risk, that becomes one more thing that nurses need to monitor amid a host of competing priorities.??

Whether it’s virtual nursing or remote patient monitoring, there has to be someone on the other end of the alert, Shoenthal stressed. “We can’t start with the tool being the end,” he told me at HLTH.

Nurses are also clear that they want to spend more time with patients — and they want AI to reduce administrative tasks, not sub in for their clinical expertise.

“That’s the human piece,” said Rhonda J. Manns, MBA, BSN, RN, CCM , who transitioned from nursing to the tech side of healthcare, and who I also met at HLTH. “Alerts and pre-warning systems are great, but if you’re going to tell me something I already know, is that really beneficial?”

Nurses want to be at the table — and, increasingly, they are.

When asked what would increase their comfort with AI, 73% of respondents to the McKinsey survey said they want to see nurses involved in its design and utilization — even more than the 69% who said they’d like more evidence on quality and safety or more guidelines and regulation.

The good news, according to Berlin, is that hospital leaders are eager to work with nurses to get their input on new technologies. She encouraged nurses to raise their hands and express their interest if they want to be involved.

“For anything that's touching patients or touching clinical workflows, I don't know any health system that wouldn't engage nurses,” she said. “There are opportunities for nurses of all levels to be involved in designing the process and how it’s used.”