This article was originally published on February 4, 2025, when Covista was Adtalem Global Education. It was updated on February 5, 2026.
 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the healthcare landscape, and for the nation’s more than 4 million registered nurses, its impact is becoming increasingly tangible in the care they provide.
 

How will this rapidly evolving technology help the most-trusted profession provide patient-centered care, improve their own wellbeing and decrease the workforce shortage? From easing administrative burden to supporting clinical decision making, AI has the potential to transform how nurses work and patients experience care. But realizing that potential requires thoughtful design, rigorous testing and deep involvement from clinicians themselves.

Few leaders understand this better than Dr. Amy McCarthy, Chief Nursing Officer at Hippocratic AI, a Covista partner. With a clinical background in maternal newborn care and more than a decade of nursing leadership experience, including director of nursing for women, infants and oncology, Dr. McCarthy brings a practical perspective to one of healthcare’s most consequential technology shifts. She also serves as president of the Texas Nurses Association and has served as director-at-large on the American Nurses Association Board of Directors.

Dr. McCarthy’s message is clear: AI is here to stay. It’s essential nurses continue to educate themselves on the changes happening in their environment because they need to be a part of those conversations, especially as these new products are being implemented in their workspaces.

Nurses’ Critical Input on AI

For many clinicians, AI still feels unfamiliar. Traditional nursing education has not historically included training on emerging technologies like AI. Dr. McCarthy sees this as a critical gap.

“AI is going to impact nursing practice, if it hasn’t already,” she emphasizes. “Clinicians need to understand how these tools work so they can advocate for patient safety, ethical use, and workflows that support care and a nurse’s role.”

This is precisely why Hippocratic AI partnered with Covista: to develop a comprehensive suite of educational materials to train clinicians on the use of AI in healthcare.

Patient Safety Starts With Clinician-Supported Design

As AI becomes more integrated into patient care, questions about safety, privacy and ethics are top of mind. Dr. McCarthy believes the answer lies in rigorous, clinician-driven evaluation.

“At Hippocratic AI, we’re constantly bringing clinicians in to evaluate AI—it’s central to our mission of doing no harm and ensuring that our product is safe for patients,” says Dr. McCarthy.

She encourages nurses to ask critical questions of any AI vendor: 
Who has been involved in the creation and testing of this product? How is it HIPAA compliant? What have the conversations been around ethics?

“When clinicians are in the loop, the technology is safer—and far more aligned with realworld practice,” she notes. “Ensuring that a human has been involved in testing what the AI sounds and acts like provides more legitimacy.”

AI as a Workforce Multiplier, Not a Replacement

One of the most common fears surrounding AI is job displacement. On this, Dr. McCarthy is unequivocal: AI is a tool. It is meant to augment—not replace—nursing.

Instead, she sees it as one of the most promising solutions to the ongoing healthcare workforce shortage. 

Nurses today face overwhelming administrative demands: documentation, reporting, patient experience tasks and constant workflow interruptions. These pressures contribute to burnout and drive many nurses away from the bedside. “AI is one of the few solutions I’ve seen in years that could realistically help to solve this crisis rather than adding to the burden with another technology,” Dr. McCarthy says.

AI can remove tasks that distract from patient care, she explains further. It can give nurses time back in their day to focus on the relationship-centered practice that draws so many people to the profession. When thinking about her own experience, she notes, “That was always my biggest fear as a nurse and a leader. In the world of maternal-infant care, it’s crucial to be present at the bedside of a patient in labor or with a new parent learning to care for a newborn. If a nurse is distracted by trying to get a piece of technology to work, it takes away from this process.”

Reflecting on her early career in maternal-newborn nursing, Dr. McCarthy sees many opportunities where AI could have improved care.

Documentation, for example, consumed significant time during frequent assessments and feedings. Today’s technologies, like ambient listening, could have allowed Dr. McCarthy to speak and have her charting done in real time, freeing her to focus more fully on parents and infants.

At the nurse leadership level, AI has great potential for nurse managers, in particular, to streamline tasks related to data analysis, patient experience and employee engagement. AI agents can facilitate more frequent and meaningful interactions with employees and assist with patient experience rounds. Instead of manually sifting through data in spreadsheets, large language models (LLMs) can analyze data swiftly, providing preliminary insights. This allows nurse leaders to focus their clinical expertise on interpreting patient results more efficiently. 

Ensuring Equity and Preventing Bias

LLMs are trained using data that humans create. AI is only as unbiased as the data it learns from. Dr. McCarthy is intentional about testing AI agents for equitable responses, especially in areas where disparities are well-documented, such as maternal health outcomes for Black women.

“Black women struggle immensely when it comes to maternal mortality and morbidity, and we don’t want LLMs interacting with patients to perpetuate stereotypes. In fact, we want it to do the opposite,” she explains.

Clinicians play a critical role in identifying and correcting biased outputs before tools reach patients. Continuous iteration and evaluation, she says, is essential.

“When our nurses are testing calls and scripts are about to go live with a partner, they’re ensuring the conversation that the AI agent is having with a patient is intentional and equitable,” Dr. McCarthy explains.

A Path Toward a More Sustainable Nursing Workforce

Ultimately, Dr. McCarthy believes thoughtfully implemented AI can help rebuild a more sustainable, fulfilling nursing profession.

“Right now, nurses are leaving the bedside in mass because what they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis is not sustainable,” she says. “There’s pressure to not just take care of patients who are coming in sicker and sicker, but also all of these other tasks that are being placed on them: incident reporting, quality assurance, patient experience, hourly rounding and more.”

By reducing administrative burden, supporting clinical workflows and enabling more meaningful patient interactions, AI can help bring nursing back to a more relationship-focused and less task-oriented profession.

“When I speak to people who have been nurses for 20 or 30 years, they talk about the ‘Golden Age of Nursing,’ and how years ago they were able to really spend time with their patients,” says Dr. McCarthy. “The reason nurses go into the profession is because we want to help people and make an impact—creating an environment where this is possible should be a priority for all companies looking to re-design healthcare.”