New Collaboration to Leverage Engineering, AI to Improve Nursing Education

The Ohio State University Colleges of Nursing and Engineering are working together to launch a new project called ‘Disrupting Nursing Education with XR, AI and ML,’ which aims to better prepare nursing graduates for real-world situations.

According to the leads on the project, many nursing students’ clinical experiences do not guarantee that they are ready for practice. Often, clinical experiences do not incorporate competency-based assessments or allow students to gain real-world experience, such as performing certain procedures or administering medications. Efforts to pair one student with one nurse also present a challenge because practicing nurses have heavy workloads and are primarily focused on patient care rather than on teaching.

The project will use extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) technologies across the core curriculum to help nursing students develop competencies that can be used in their clinical experiences. The AI/ML tools will present students with increasingly complex scenarios, allowing them to gain skills and confidence in a low-stakes environment. The XR tool can provide tailored support based on student needs.

“If we want to fulfill our promise to dream, discover and deliver a healthier world for our future, we must prepare our students to create that future,” said Bernadette Melnyk, PhD, vice president for health promotion, university chief wellness officer, and dean of the College of Nursing, in the press release. “This awesome project out of our Center for Healthcare Innovation and Leadership will utilize new-age technology and revolutionary design to transform how we educate our students to be evidence-based, confident, and innovative clinicians. We are so grateful to [the American Nurses Foundation Reimagining Nursing Initiative] and to our terrific partners at the College of Engineering who saw our vision and potential to truly disrupt nursing education and prepare clinicians to transform health and improve lives.”

The project is funded by a $1.5 million grant from the American Nurses Foundation Reimagining Nursing Initiative. It will be implemented and evaluated over three years. The Colleges of Nursing and Engineering are expected to report results, showcase evidence of the project’s impact, and provide resources to help scale the project to other nursing programs by 2025.

Another project combining AI and nursing expertise also recently received a grant from the American Nurses Foundation Reimagining Nursing Initiative.

Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) launched a multi-hospital effort known as the CONCERN (COmmunicating Narrative Concerns Entered by RNs) Initiative, which aims to improve patient outcomes by leveraging nursing expertise and artificial intelligence to create a model that can predict critical conditions in hospitalized patients.

The CONCERN tool analyzes the frequency and types of nursing documentation that indicate nurses’ increased surveillance and concern for a patient. This information, documented in the 48 hours preceding a cardiac arrest and hospital mortality, has been found to be predictive of such events.

The tool then extracts nursing documentation data from EHRs and presents it to clinicians to increase situational awareness of at-risk patients and decrease preventable adverse outcomes.