Nursing and Artificial Intelligence
by Professor Max Topaz
Some of the traditional core values of nursing are very humanistic in nature, as nurses focus on providing compassionate care to their patients. With that, novel artificial intelligence technologies are being increasingly adopted by nurses to provide more timely and personalized care.
One example are systems that support clinical decision making. For example, my team developed a clinical decision support system called PREVENT, that helps to automatically identify patients at high risk for negative outcomes. We use this system to help nurses in home health settings decide which patients should be prioritized for care, thus reducing unnecessary hospitalizations and keeping patients home.
Artificial intelligence in also helping nurses to process vast amounts of electronic patient data. For example, we developed a free and open-source software called NimbleMiner that helps clinicians and researchers to mine free-text clinical notes. NimbleMiner was applied to process millions of clinical notes in different languages (including Hebrew, English and Russian) to help identify patients who have social risk factors (e.g., alcohol or drug abuse) or unreported medical conditions (e.g., diabetes).
Currently, NimbleMiner is being used in a project that focuses on predicting the clinical trajectory of COVID-19 at one of the largest hospitals in New York. Specifically, NimbleMiner helps to identify COVID-19 symptoms in nursing and physician notes (e.g., difficulty breathing, cough, etc.). This data will be then combined with data from other sources to identify patients who are likely to require intensive care during their hospital stay. This information will help us to provide early care to patients at risk for COVID-19 exacerbation.
In the near future, we expect to see an extended use of artificial intelligence approaches to help nurses capture what they do (e.g., capturing nurse-patient verbal conversations) and help provide increasingly personalized and high-quality care to their patients.
Max Topaz PhD, RN, MA, is the Elizabeth Standish Gill Associate Professor of Nursing at Columbia University Medical Center and the Columbia University Data Science Institute & Visiting Nurse Service of New York. He was a Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010.