Getting Started with AI in Clinical Environments: A Nurse Leader's Roadmap

Perioperative teams run on standards — protocols, order sets, checklists, preference cards. Few can say with confidence that the standard on the page is the standard being followed in the room. That gap between documented practice and delivered care is where variation accumulates, and almost no one can measure it.

AI is now being sold as the answer to that gap, and to much else in perioperative work: documentation burden, protocol maintenance, staffing and OR scheduling, guidance retrieved mid-case. Some of it holds up. Much of it does not survive contact with a live service line.

Nurses are the ones who find out. They touch nearly every protocol in the perioperative episode and are usually the first to see when documented practice and actual practice have drifted apart. That makes nurse leaders the right people to decide which tools get implemented and how - provided they are in the room when the decision is made, and asking the right questions when they get there.

OR Today brings together three nurse leaders who have worked both sides of that problem: the daily failures technology promises to fix, and the work of judging whether a given product actually fixes them. They will discuss what has helped, what has not, and what to establish before signing anything.

Panelists

• Vangie Dennis, MSN, RN, CMLSO, CNOR, FAORN, FAAN - Perioperative Nurse Executive & Consultant, Perioperative Consultants, LLC
• Sicknee Daher, BSN, RN - Clinical Practice Director, Perioperative Services, Henry Ford Health
• Galia Fisher, MSN, RN - VP of Customer Success, C8 Health