According to projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States will be short one million nurses by the year 2024. But AI may be part of the solution.
So says tech writer Evan Dashevsky in a recent review of the potential impacts of AI across the healthcare sector.
As he explains the looming nursing shortage, there are number of contributing factors, including a shortage of openings in nursing schools, increased competition for talent and an increased need for care from the aging boomer population.
A complicating problem he cites involves hospitals that are forced to spend more resources to recruit and retain qualified nurses, which can add additional financial strains. AI, however, can help mitigate the crisis by improving nurse productivity.
For example, “according to a report from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, nurses spend about 10% of their shifts on ‘delegable or non-nursing activities [that] could have been used more effectively for patient care,’ and nearly a quarter of their time on ‘documentation.’
“AI can free nurses from high-volume and routine administrative tasks, which means they can spend more time providing quality care to patients. Not only can AI be used to automate tasks such as sending out appointment confirmations or securely organizing patient data, but virtual agents . . . can automate more complex processes such as collecting information on patients’ symptoms. Virtual agents are not yet ready to provide actual diagnoses and treatment recommendations, but they can automate data and information gathering that can often be time-consuming for nurses and providers.”
As Dashevsky sees it, automation can help patients be matched with the right care provider right away, and “more importantly it can also maximize a provider’s time by independently executing many routine processes, be they on the backend or patient-facing.”
AI is also particularly helpful, he says, when it comes to executing processes related to compliance. “Healthcare is one of the world’s most regulated sectors, which means providers are compelled to navigate an evolving patchwork of regulations and protocols. When partnered with AI, compliance officers are able to tweak protocols instantly at scale, which provides healthcare providers with access to the most up-to-date procedures and reduces overall training time. This ensures that providers and the facilities in which they work remain in compliance at all times.”