By Laura Gasque
Implementing emerging technologies is at the forefront of nursing education in the new American Association of Colleges of Nursing Essentials and the School is exploring ways to incorporate artificial intelligence tools and methodologies to prepare nursing students for technology-driven health care environments.
“We have to listen to what’s going on in the field and understand what it takes to get our students what they need to be competitive in the future,” said University Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Linda Moneyham, PhD, RN, FAAN.
The School started an AI Taskforce focused on transforming nursing education with two main goals—investigating ways to incorporate AI into the curriculum and developing a graduate certificate in AI, in collaboration with the UAB Heersink School of Medicine and the Marnix E. Heersink Institute for Biomedical Innovation.
The SON AI Taskforce is focusing on the use of AI in teaching and learning. They are working with faculty to develop innovative use of AI in the classroom and clinical settings, as well as address concerns in student use of AI in coursework. AI already is being incorporated into some courses, including in the Fundamentals of Database Management course in the informatics specialty track in the graduate program.
“I ask the students to use AI throughout the different modules in the assignments to act as an assistant to help validate the work that they do,” said course Instructor Chris Hickman, MSIS. “We always said that if we don’t start offering AI within the context of our coursework, then we’re doing our students a disservice whenever they get out in the field and they see these new technologies come online.”
Hickman said the SON AI Taskforce is collaborating with industry partners to develop AI tools to enhance clinical decision-making and streamline health care operations. They also have published articles on AI in health care, one of which discusses innovative methods for using AI to simulate realistic patient interactions.
“For simulation and nursing education, AI is and is going to be a powerful tool that we can use, we just need to determine how best to integrate it and implement it effectively,” said Professor and Associate Dean for Technology and Innovation Penni Watts, PhD, RN, CHSE-A, FNAP, ANEF, FSSH, FAAN (PhD 2015). “I compare it to back when I took a statistics course, we couldn’t use a calculator. Now, you would never go to a stats class without a calculator. So in nursing education, we need to figure out how we integrate AI without taking away the skills that we want our students to have, because you’re not always going to have AI or something else to solve all your problems.”
The School also recently partnered with the UAB Heersink School of Medicine, Marnix E. Heersink Institute for Biomedical Innovation, UAB School of Health Professions and Maastricht University in Germany for a symposium on integrating AI into health care education and practice. The goal of the event was to build workforce and practice capacity by showcasing innovative AI applications in health care.
“There is so much to learn about AI and how it can be applied in clinical nursing practice,” Moneyham, who helped coordinate the symposium, said. “Because we have only begun to understand the many potential applications of AI for improving patient and health systems outcomes, it is important that we work collaboratively with other disciplines to discover new applications while also exploring the limits of AI and preventing its misuse. Nurses need to be knowledgeable consumers of AI.”
