SSM Health’s Seth Lovell on AI and nursing

Chicago - Seth Lovell thinks a lot about artificial intelligence and nursing.

Lovell is the vice president of nursing transformation and innovation at SSM Health, a Catholic health system operating hospitals in Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. He also sits on an AI committee for the health system.

“Our approach to AI, and I think, much like everyone else, is first focused on safety,” Lovell says. “We're really looking at this through the lens of safety and risk first.”

He spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® in an interview at the Fairmont Hotel while attending the Becker’s Healthcare 16th Annual Meeting in Chicago.

During a wide-ranging conversation, Lovell talked about the opportunities ahead with AI, ensuring nurses play a key role in the use and deployment of AI, and how the nursing profession has changed in recent years.

• Read more: How SSM Health is working to develop and keep more nurses

‘A unique opportunity’

With the growing adoption of AI into the health system, Lovell says he hopes to take lessons from the past.

“I feel like every time we did technology implementations, for example, in the past, we weren't really thinking about how it was going to potentially increase workload burden,” he says. “And a good example of that is maybe our EHR electronic health record implementations.”

Before the advent of electronic health record systems, Lovell recalled filling out paper forms in a short amount of time. Nurses could fill out a couple of sentences, check some boxes and be done quickly.

While many healthcare leaders stress the value of electronic health record systems, executives, doctors and nurses also acknowledge that the new systems significantly added to the time spent on documentation. Doctors and nurses spent hours updating electronic health records, and have cited the administrative load as a key contributor to burnout.

While Lovell said the move to electronic records was needed, “That actually increased the time it takes to document by sometimes over 30 minutes on average.”

“So right now, I think we have a unique opportunity,” he continues. “It's something that we're really keeping front and center, which is, how do we leverage artificial intelligence in a way that actually reduces the workload burden that is put on our caregivers? So anything that we can do to really offload, optimize, automate and take those responsibilities away from our care team is something that's incredibly important to us.”

Nurses as ‘co-designers’

Nurses have said they welcome the chance to utilize AI in their work, but some nursing leaders say healthcare organizations are missing opportunities by not including nurses in the process of choosing and developing AI solutions.

Lovell says that SSM Health is working to get the input of nurses as the system uses AI more widely.

“We want to make sure that our practicing clinicians have a voice in how artificial intelligence is being used and deployed,” he says.

The system makes sure those that are delivering care to patients are involved in AI solutions.

“We have really firm, established nursing governance groups that come together with a variety of different focus areas, and they've become quite powerful for us,” Lovell says. “When we're looking for frontline feedback and, just even help with how we should implement, how we should approach, where we should pilot, etc.”

Nurses have also been involved as the system moves to using Epic’s electronic health record system across the organization. Nurses in all care settings across the system are weighing in on workflows, and that information is being given to Epic for the implementation.

“It's really important for us to ensure that they're maybe co-designers of the future,” Lovell says. “And I think that, given the leadership experience and expertise, and you know, obviously their responsibility to help ensure that we have the right strategies, we're pointing in the right direction. Combine that with the incredible work that our frontline caregivers are doing every single day. I just don't think you can go wrong.”

The changing role of nurses

When Lovell thinks about his time as a nurse at the bedside, he says much of the work involved “task-based nursing.”

Nurses have different demands today.

“We've never asked more of the nurse,” Lovell says. “They're kind of like the central nervous system of the care team. They are expected to be experts in quality and safety and experience, and, even in performance improvement, right? They're doing huddles around metrics every single day. They're identifying gaps. They're coming up with ideas on how to close those gaps. There's been an evolution with, I would say, the expectations of the role.”

Nurses have also become virtual experts in equipment and technology.

But he says health systems are working to reduce the demands on nurses where possible.

“I think it's really up to us to ensure that we are really, really focused on reducing workload burden,” Lovell says.

When workforce challenges arise, in everything from respiration therapy to food services, nurses have often been asked to help.

“Anytime a responsibility falls short, it does go back onto the nurse,” Lovell says. “So how do we ensure that we're really hardening the care team around the nurse and ensuring that we're able to support them, so that the work is sustainable long-term.”

(Nicole Jussen interviewed Seth Lovell in Chicago.)