Nursing and Informatics for the 21st Century – Embracing a Digital World, 3rd Edition
Book 3: Innovation, Technology, and Applied Informatics for Nurses
2022 Productivity Press: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003281016
Chapter 7
Authors: Martin Michalowski, Jung In Park
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been transformative for many public and private industries, and we are currently observing an AI-led revolution in healthcare. AI is a fundamental paradigm shift in healthcare that is already affecting nurses in their everyday work, and its impact will be even more pronounced in the future. AI is embedded in nurses’ daily life as algorithms, smart systems and in their education. Even though AI applications in healthcare date back to the late 1970s, technological advances in robotics and computing and the right social climate have created ideal conditions to take full advantage of what AI can contribute to improving the provision of care. Yet, healthcare constitutes a complex system that presents many challenges to AI’s adoption. Ethics, the ability to explain and justify models’ results, education of patients and providers, inherent biases and social equity are some of the non-technical issues that need to be addressed for AI solutions to be safely integrated into care delivery. In this chapter, we introduce four key sub-areas of AI (Robotics, Machine Learning, Mobile Technology and Virtual and Augmented Reality), describe their applications to nursing and discuss cautions that need to be considered in their implementation.