Hospitals must work with nurses on AI to get it right | HLTH 2025

Las Vegas - Nurses have long cherished their role in caring for patients and even serving as their advocates.

As hospitals are turning to more ways to incorporate AI tools, it’s vitally important to bring those nurses to the table early, says Lavonia Thomas, nursing informatics officer at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

“That's why they're so vitally important to be at the table, because that's solely what they look at through their lens,” Thomas says. “Is this going to help me improve my time with the patient? Is this going to help me improve my communication with the patient?”

Thomas participated in a panel discussion at the HLTH conference, and she spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® about the development of AI and the concerns of nurses in using those tools effectively.

Too often, hospitals and health systems have acquired or developed new digital tools and simply added them to nurses’ workflows. That approach typically leads to problems.

Thomas speaks with unvarnished enthusiasm about the potential for AI to help nurses, but she says it’s critical for hospitals and health systems looking to incorporate those technologies to get nurses involved from the very beginning.

“I want to be sure that nursing is at the table from the design phase, and that we have full transparency into these AI tools,” Thomas says.

“What someone in one sector within healthcare would think is involving early, isn't really involving early,” she adds. “Early is from the onset of concept.”

(See part of our conversation at HLTH. The story continues below.)

‘We’re not fearful’

Hospitals need to be thoughtful about develop strong governance for the use and deployment of AI technologies and need the right key players to weigh in on them, especially those on the front line.

Thomas acknowledges that health systems won’t be able to get the opinion of every nurse, but she says, “There needs to be proper representation at the table.”

Nurses are often unfairly characterized as being reluctant to embrace new technology, which Thomas says simply isn’t accurate.

“We're not fearful. Look at what we have to deal with in ICUs and operating rooms and the emergency centers. We've adapted to technology long ago,” she says.

But nurses are always going to be focused on the patient’s safety, and that’s why nurses need more insight on AI tools. If an AI tool is suggesting a course of action, nurses want to know where the data is coming from and how it’s being analyzed.

“That's why it's vitally important for full transparency for these AI tools and to have nurses at the very beginning making that assessment,” she says.

Nurses are innovative in terms of working around problems and finding the best ways to do their jobs and care for patients. That’s good in many respects, but it’s often by necessity.

Often, it’s because a digital tool wasn’t employed correctly.

“We are innovative, that's for sure, and it's usually been to work around a technology that was making our lives harder, not easier,” Thomas says. “And we're trying to get nurses away from doing that, but a nurse is going to always critically assess any technology against taking care of a patient, because if it gets in the way of taking care of the patient, then the nurses are not going to adopt it.”

“I believe that ability to look for ways to get things done, we need to capture that at the onset, to get the right technology, not give them the technology and force them to work around it,” she adds.

For hospitals to succeed in adding AI tools, Thomas says it’s important to treat it as iterative.

“This is a big change with a lot of potential, but if you go at it and try to bite off too much and try to implement too quickly, you're going to alienate folks that may have otherwise adopted it,” she said. “Go at it slowly. Listen to frontline nurses, because no two units are ever the same.”

• Read more: Why some health leaders are hesitant about AI

‘A revolutionary change’

MD Anderson is close to deploying AI-powered ambient documentation tools for nurses, which will summarize information on patients automatically. She says the launch is planned for January.

“We're already planning that change management ahead of even introducing the technology, because it will represent a revolutionary change in how we do things,” Thomas says.

And part of that means moving nurses away from just entering patient information on flow sheets. Nurses will be talking more with patients, and that information will get entered automatically.

“We have to get nurses used to nursing out loud,” she says.

Now nurses will be asked to assess patients, head to toe, and engage them in a conversation.

“Talk about your findings as you're going along,” she says. “Let the patient govern a little bit.”

Since nurses will be able to look at their patients more directly, they can make more nuanced observations, she said. They may be notice if a patient’s hands are shaking slightly.

“Those are subtle things that a nurse would use in an assessment to determine that maybe there's a little more I need to explore,” Thomas says.

Nurses have a wide variety of opinions about the use of AI in health care, Thomas says. Some are enthusiastic about new technologies, others are wary and concerned about the impact of patient safety, and others are simply waiting to see what happens, since they’ve seen new tools before.

In her experience, Thomas says fears are alleviated when nurses are able to look at what’s behind the AI technology and are fully engaged at the beginning.

“I think they're welcoming the opportunity to be a part of this change,” she says. “They see it coming. People use AI in their everyday lives. There are so many people now using ChatGPT, for example, for a whole host of things. And I think they're seeing that, you know, it's going to come to health care as well.

And she adds, “We need some help to manage all this big data that we're dealing with.”

Thomas says she thinks AI tools can reduce burnout in nurses and help some rediscover the joy in the work that they do.

She also thinks AI tools offer the potential to improve patient care.

“I think that it'll tell a better picture of the patient,” Thomas says. “And again, I just see this as an opportunity, if we do this right, to really make this something that partners with the nurse, not just one added thing that they have to figure out how to put into their day.”