AI in Nursing, Part 2: When Your Licensing Board Gets Involved
Patient safety is the first priority of every nurse. AI can be a real asset in meeting that goal, as an Allnurses.com news article explains. It can also be a barrier to the kinds of expert patient care a licensed nurse with years of hands-on experience can provide. And when mistakes happen in an AI-driven healthcare setting, the nurses are likely to come under fire. They can even lose their license.
The Professional License Defense Team at the LLF National Law Firm is committed to preventing that. We know you’ve proven your value and your competence over and over, and that AI-driven systems, while they’re a boon to patient care in many ways, can also lead to terrible mistakes. If your board is coming after you for an error involving AI, call us at 888-535-3686 or send us a message online so we can get started protecting your license.
The Audit Trail: Your Board Can Reconstruct All of Your Decisions
We’ve already looked at a few of the ways AI can create a problem for nurses: they might not catch an error in AI-generated notes covering discussions with patients, for instance, or an AI monitoring system might send so many notifications the nurse tunes them out, or the nurse might be convinced to trust the AI more than their own instincts, even when the AI is wrong.
Here, we’ll consider the role of the electronic “paper trail” a board can use to follow a nurse’s decision process step by step.
As we saw in part 1, one way AI becomes problematic for nurses is when it sends out notification after notification regarding negligible changes in a patient’s condition — body temperature ticks up or down a fraction, for example, or blood pressure briefly shifts slightly for a moment, then returns to where it was. Each of these alterations triggers a notification. After a while, a busy nurse keeps their attention on more urgent matters.
When a truly important notification arrives — blood pressure drops, then drops again, then again — the nurse misses these pings because they’re lost in the noise. It doesn’t end well for the patient.
Based on the electronic “paper” trail, the nurse’s licensing board will be able to reconstruct the entire sequence of notifications and interventions:
- What the nurse knew
- When they knew it
- And what they did or didn’t do in response
That’s just one scenario. Another: a nurse decides to trust AI-generated care instructions — and the patient goes into organ failure. The board can reconstruct every decision point and fault the nurse for not using their professional judgment to override the AI’s bad advice.
Bring in the Professional License Defense Team
Audit trails seem impressive at first glance, but the closer you look, the weaker they become as evidence of negligence or wrongdoing. That’s why you need a team that can force every step of an inquiry to adhere to due process and evidentiary standards, and illuminate the gaps where an electronic trail fails to capture the full context of a question about patient care or professionalism. The LLF National Law Firm knows you can’t reduce nursing to an algorithm. We’ll make sure your board knows it, too.
If your board is coming after your license, contact us today by sending us a message online or calling 888-535-3686.