Abstract
Background Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools may soon be integrated into health
care practice and research. Nurses in leadership roles, many of whom are doctorally
prepared, will need to determine whether and how to integrate them in a safe and useful
way.
Objective This study aimed to develop and evaluate a brief intervention to increase PhD nursing
students' knowledge of appropriate applications for using generative AI tools in health
care.
Methods We created didactic lectures and laboratory-based activities to introduce generative
AI to students enrolled in a nursing PhD data science and visualization course. Students
were provided with a subscription to Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer (ChatGPT)
4.0, a general-purpose generative AI tool, for use in and outside the class. During
the didactic portion, we described generative AI and its current and potential future
applications in health care, including examples of appropriate and inappropriate applications.
In the laboratory sessions, students were given three tasks representing different
use cases of generative AI in health care practice and research (clinical decision
support, patient decision support, and scientific communication) and asked to engage
with ChatGPT on each. Students (n = 10) independently wrote a brief reflection for each task evaluating safety (accuracy,
hallucinations) and usability (ease of use, usefulness, and intention to use in the
future). Reflections were analyzed using directed content analysis.
Results Students were able to identify the strengths and limitations of ChatGPT in completing
all three tasks and developed opinions on whether they would feel comfortable using
ChatGPT for similar tasks in the future. All of them reported increasing their self-rated
competency in generative AI by one to two points on a five-point rating scale.
Conclusion This brief educational intervention supported doctoral nursing students in understanding
the appropriate uses of ChatGPT, which may support their ability to appraise and use
these tools in their future work.
Keywords
artificial intelligence - nursing informatics - informatics - medical informatics
- nursing students - graduate nursing education - nursing education research
