AI newswatch: Nurses want in, transcriptionists on the way out, blockchain going up, more

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• If doctors are the heart of the hospital, nurses are surely the soul. To the extent the cliché is on the money, at least poetically, today’s AI has to be something like a nutritional supplement for the brain of the operation. The hospital’s Prevagen, if you will. Or, if you prefer, its Focus Factor, Neuriva or Brain Power Plus. In any case, nurses should be getting more of a say in how the tech-based supplement is formulated, recommended and administered. And nurse leaders are saying so. “[Q]uite often we have these technology companies who do not have nurses on staff, who do not have nurses involved in creating these [AI] technologies,” says Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, RN, PhD, MBA. President of the American Nurses Association, Mensik Kennedy surely speaks for many when she adds: 
   
  • “I’ve seen AI tools that were supposed to help nurses, and I’ve been very greatly disappointed this last year in those results and what they thought they were helping with. So I think there’s a lot to learn, and nurses should be at the table—every single table—when it comes to where we need the AI help and what the AI should be doing.” 
     
  • Mensik Kennedy made the comments while taking questions from Chief Healthcare Executive. Get the rest. 
     
• Nurses are certainly familiar enough with generative AI to know what’s what. This comes through in the Wolters Kluwer survey released this week and noted in this space. In that market research, very close to 60% of nurses indicated they use GenAI in their personal lives once a week or more. “Throughout the survey, nurses and pharmacists consistently self-identified as the most ready and willing to see how GenAI can work for them,” the survey report authors underscore. More than half of pharmacists (52%) and 45% of nurses agreed that GenAI “will be effective for reducing burnout, likely by cutting down on repetitive non-clinical tasks, assisting with documentation, managing communication and generally streamlining the care process.” Download the full report. 
   
• It’s probably safe to predict a marked decrease in demand for medical transcriptionists. After all, the ascendance of AI scribe technologies into healthcare has been observably meteoric. Other healthcare jobs likely to fade away due to GenAI’s increasing aptitude include roles centered on basic administrative data entry, transactional work and rule-based tasks. On the other hand, positions sure to happily rise include AI/machine learning specialists, healthcare data scientists and cloud architects. This seems to be the consensus among subject matter experts spotlighted in a conference sneak peek posted at Becker’s Health IT June 4. “Over the next two years, how teams adopt and champion generative AI will be critical in achieving future success,” says Lisa Carter, an executive with four-state, Tennessee-based Ballad Health. The upcoming conference is Becker’s 10th annual thinkfest on health IT, digital health and revenue cycle management. This year’s gathering will be in Chicago Sept. 30 to Oct. 3. More advance quotes from invited speakers here, conference info here. 
   
• Poor communications capabilities continue to dog nursing homes. Blockchain could help. How? By supplying a decentralized data-sharing system—one that’s very hard to hack and relatively easy to use. The burgeoning technology is especially appropriate for elder care, a medical student suggests, because long-term care facilities often need to send and receive data to and from hospitals, physician offices and other sites critical to the patient’s care. “The U.S. healthcare system cannot continue sacrificing patient safety while hiding behind outdated technology,” writes the bold student and undergrad research assistant, Adwait Chafale of Penn State, at KevinMD. “The question is not whether we should adopt blockchain, but how quickly we can implement it before more of our loved ones suffer.” Hear him out. 
   
• Given the chance, AI models could excel as corporate coaches. Sure, their human counterparts are peerless when it comes to forging and sustaining authentically empathetic connections. They’re also untouchable at active listening, tailored guidance and compassionate accountability. Still, AI coaches are pretty good at personalizing encouragements at scale, giving quick feedback in real time, staying available around the clock and, importantly, costing less. An experienced coach and technologist does the comparing and contrasting in a piece published by the Association for Talent Development. “If coaching is seen as providing guidance toward specific objectives or offering practical advice on challenges, then AI can certainly play a role,” writes Charlotte Saulny, chief executive of Coaching.com. Echoing a theme familiar to healthcare providers, she adds: “By integrating AI into their practice, human coaches can focus more on meaningful interactions while benefiting from data-driven insights.”
   
• Intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing, but there’s not as much daylight between the two as many of us might like to think. Which raises a philosophical question: Can artificial intelligence attain some measure of artificial—or de facto actual—consciousness? A writer at the French National Center for Scientific Research takes up the question. “If we define consciousness solely by the ability to process information and exercise reason, some AI systems could already be considered conscious,” notes journalist Erwan Dubois. “But if consciousness necessarily implies an organic, subjective and emotional aspect, these machines still have a long way to go.” Read the piece.
   
• Professional org seeks AI research papers angled on medical imaging. SIIM, the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine, will consider abstracts sent by July 24. Researchers whose works are selected will be invited to present their studies orally or by poster at the group’s conference on AI in medical imaging in October at UC-Irvine. They’ll also have their papers published by Springer Nature in a supplement to the Journal of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (JIIM). Details on both the call for abstracts and the conference are here. 
   
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