The Nursing College of the Florida State University has launched what calls the first Master in Science Science Program in the country and is creating an AI Innovation Consortium. Jing Wang, Ph.D., MPH, RN, dean of the Nursing School, recently spoke with Health innovation about why it is so important to start instilling tools and concepts of AI in nursing and medical education.
In addition to his role in FSU, Wang is an attached professor in Biomedical Computer and Public Health at the University Sciences Center of the University of Texas in Houston. Its interdisciplinary research uses mobile and connected health technologies to optimize multiple lifestyle interventions by behavior and improve patient -centered results between populations with chronic and aged diseases with multiple chronic conditions, especially among rural and disregarded populations .
She has also served as a senior scientific advisor of the Agency for the Research and Quality of Medical Care and works with the Service Centers of Medicare and Medicaid and the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology as a senior policy advisor.
Health innovation: We write a lot about how health systems are implementing AI solutions in clinical care, but we have not written much about how medical schools and nursing schools approach, so it intrigued me to know that it is integrating The AI in Nursing Education and Practice in FSU. Could you talk about some of the ways in which you are thinking about addressing it in nursing education?
Wang: It is so critical that we are educating the next generation of health workers in the adoption of these AI solutions. Nurses are the largest group of health professionals and have been the most reliable professionals for more than 25 years. The nurses are next to the bed, are in the first line of attention and are implementing all digital and AI solutions. If you ask the health system leaders that they implement solutions of the underground implementation, they will almost always say that more than 50% are nurses.
However, we have not really been up to date in the academic field with this transformation of AI. But we cannot simply teach the same content every day at the Nursing School and expect graduates to only discover how AI in their clinical practice.
I have been taking advantage of my own experience in digital health and AI to see what we can do with students. Before Covid, I started gathering nurses and doctors students to learn about intelligent and connected health technology. When Covid hit, all students needed to have the skills to deliver telemedicine. Fast advance now and it is that we feel that we cannot ignore. That is why we gave the bold step of launching the first master’s degree in Nation Sciences in Nursing with a concentration focused on AI applications in medical care.
HCI: Do people who go through the program have to understand the concepts of automatic learning and understand things about algorithmic bias, or are it more about feeling comfortable working with health tools that have modules integrated into them, or both ?
Wang: It is a kind of hybrid of the two things he mentioned, because for nurses feel comfortable with what they are implementing, they need to understand some of the fundamental principles of AI such as automatic learning, deep learning, predictive analysis, such as as well as where some of the possible biases and hallucinations could enter. We are not trying to train these nurses to be engineers or encoders, but it’s more about that collaboration. When I use the term interprofessional education, it is about teaching students how to speak the languages of others in one way that they can understand the other party and the other party can listen to them.
HCI: Do you have an established number of students who will go through the program at the same time?
Wang: We have about 1,000 students in the different undergraduate and teacher programs. For this particular master program, we are starting with about 15 students, and we are aimed at growing in approximately 70 per year. The program began in January.
HCI: I also understand that you are establishing an IA innovation consortium in FSU. Who will participate in that and what will it focus on?
Wang: The consortium is actually more a national effort that will be based on the Florida State University Faculty. The idea is to provide this collaboration platform to advance research and education policy. We are finishing the initial list of members interested in joining us as a consortium. It will include leading health systems that really wish to put their nurses at the forefront, but also peer nursing schools that also have great interest in leading innovation for AI in nursing education.
HCI: What about companies that traditionally publish a curriculum for nursing programs? Are you involved in the creation of a study plan for nurses or do you have to create the content yourself?
Wang: We are creating all the content ourselves, but some of the teachers of our course are the main nursing officers of the AI company, and also the main nursing officers of medical care systems with a deep computer training. Every year, the content is evolving, so we actually involve many entrepreneurs in the AI industry to be invited teachers, so we can learn the most recent science in AI and what is in the industry. One of our co -director with whom we have hired is a residence businesswoman, Rebecca Love, who is innovative and nursing businesswoman and really contributes her extensive experience in nursing entrepreneurship and AI. We also have a co -director who has a deep digital health research experience, and we have other nurses with computer history.
HCI: This must open enough ways for research on how this is affecting nursing workflow in hospitals, but also in other environments, such as home care …
Wang: Yes, exactly. That is why we really see research as the central focus of the consortium, because we recognize that we cannot just look at the same problem and give it an AI tool. We really need to understand workflows in medical care environments. Some nurses are really anti-Ai today because there is this incorrect perception that it will be something else that will move me away from my patients. However, it should actually reduce the time that nurses will spend in front of a computer. And nurses end up being the people who need juggling with everything when there are living patients in front of us. So I think that research is basic by observing the implementation of these new AI solutions. They have great potential, but if they do not do well, they will actually create more burden for our current workforce of medical care that is already overloaded with electronic solutions.
