Aim: To develop a consensus paper on the central points of an international invitational think‐tank on nursing and artificial intelligence (AI).Methods: We established the Nursing and Artificial Intelligence Leadership (NAIL) Collaborative, comprising interdisciplinary experts in AI development, biomedical ethics, AI in primary care, AI legal aspects, philosophy of AI in health, nursing practice, implementation science, leaders in health informatics practice and international health informatics groups, a representative of patients and the public, and the Chair of the ITU/WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health. The NAIL Collaborative convened at a 3‐day invitational think tank in autumn 2019. Activities included a pre‐event survey, expert presentations and working sessions to identify priority areas for action, opportunities and recommendations to address these. In this paper, we summarize the key discussion points and notes from the aforementioned activities.Implications for nursing: Nursing's limited current engagement with discourses on AI and health posts a risk that the profession is not part of the conversations that have potentially significant impacts on nursing practice.Conclusion: There are numerous gaps and a timely need for the nursing profession to be among the leaders and drivers of conversations around AI in health systems.Impact: We outline crucial gaps where focused effort is required for nursing to take a leadership role in shaping AI use in health systems. Three priorities were identified that need to be addressed in the near future: (a) Nurses must understand the relationship between the data they collect and AI technologies they use; (b) Nurses need to be meaningfully involved in all stages of AI: from development to implementation; and (c) There is a substantial untapped and an unexplored potential for nursing to contribute to the development of AI technologies for global health and humanitarian efforts.

Research on technologies based on artificial intelligence in healthcare has increased during the last decade, with applications showing great potential in assisting and improving care. However, introducing these technologies into nursing can raise concerns related to data bias in the context of training algorithms and potential implications for certain populations. Little evidence exists in the extant literature regarding the efficacious application of many artificial intelligence -based health technologies used in healthcare. To synthesize currently available state-of the-art research in artificial intelligence -based technologies applied in nursing practice. Scoping review METHODS: PubMed, CINAHL, Web of Science and IEEE Xplore were searched for relevant articles with queries that combine names and terms related to nursing, artificial intelligence and machine learning methods. Included studies focused on developing or validating artificial intelligence -based technologies with a clear description of their impacts on nursing. We excluded non-experimental studies and research targeted at robotics, nursing management and technologies used in nursing research and education. A total of 7610 articles published between January 2010 and March 2021 were revealed, with 93 articles included in this review. Most studies explored the technology development (n = 55, 59.1%) and formation (testing) (n = 28, 30.1%) phases, followed by implementation (n = 9, 9.7%) and operational (n = 1, 1.1%) phases. The vast majority (73.1%) of studies provided evidence with a descriptive design (level VI) while only a small portion (4.3%) were randomised controlled trials (level II). The study aims, settings and methods were poorly described in the articles, and discussion of ethical considerations were lacking in 36.6% of studies. Additionally, one-third of papers (33.3%) were reported without the involvement of nurses. Contemporary research on applications of artificial intelligence -based technologies in nursing mainly cover the earlier stages of technology development, leaving scarce evidence of the impact of these technologies and implementation aspects into practice. The content of research reported is varied. Therefore, guidelines on research reporting and implementing artificial intelligence -based technologies in nursing are needed. Furthermore, integrating basic knowledge of artificial intelligence -related technologies and their applications in nursing education is imperative, and interventions to increase the inclusion of nurses throughout the technology research and development process is needed.

Advances in computational and data sciences for data management, integration, mining, classification, filtering, visualization along with engineering innovations in medical devices have prompted demands for more comprehensive and coherent strategies to address the most fundamental questions in health care and medicine. Theory, methods, and models from artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the health care landscape in clinical and community settings and have already shown promising results in multiple applications in healthcare including, integrated health information systems, patient education, geocoding health data, social media analytics, epidemic and syndromic surveillance, predictive modeling and decision support, mobile health, and medical imaging (e.g. radiology and retinal image analyses). Health intelligence uses tools and methods from artificial intelligence and data science to provide better insights, reduce waste and wait time, and increase speed, service efficiencies, level of accuracy, and productivity in health care and medicine.

The papers in this special section focus on explainable artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare services. Recent advances in AI, precision health, and medicine have paved the way for the accelerated adaptation and use of intelligent tools and systems in decision-making processes across the healthcare spectrum. Insights and knowledge derived from complex analytics are used to implement diagnostic and therapeutic solutions and targeted interventions in individuals and communities across the globe. Given the complexity of the current multi-dimensional clinical and public health data landscape, providing explainability in the context of socio-environmental and technical systems is a key to revealing pathways from socio-economic disadvantages to health disparities and implementing equitable interventions. As the complexity of the underlying data sets and AI-based algorithms increases, the explainability and justifiability of the insights generated decrease. Humans need to understand the underlying mechanism behind these insights to know whether they are sound, correct, trustable, and justifiable to make informed decisions. Lack of understandability and explainability in the biomedical domain often leads to poor transparency and accountability and ultimately lower quality of care and suboptimal and unfair health policies. Explainability is considered one of the prerequisites for deep medicine, where AI is meant to provide composite, panoramic views of individuals’ medical data.

The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly recognized due to concerns such as algorithmic bias, opacity, trust issues, data security, and fairness. Specifically, machine learning algorithms, central to AI technologies, are essential in striving for ethically sound systems that mimic human intelligence. These technologies rely heavily on data, which often remain obscured within complex systems and must be prioritized for ethical collection, processing, and usage. The significance of data ethics in achieving responsible AI was first highlighted in the broader context of health care and subsequently in nursing. This viewpoint explores the principles of data ethics, drawing on relevant frameworks and strategies identified through a formal literature review. These principles apply to real-world and synthetic data in AI and machine-learning contexts. Additionally, the data-centric AI paradigm is briefly examined, emphasizing its focus on data quality and the ethical development of AI solutions that integrate human-centered domain expertise. The ethical considerations specific to nursing are addressed, including 4 recommendations for future directions in nursing practice, research, and education and 2 hypothetical nurse-focused ethical case studies. The primary objectives are to position nurses to actively participate in AI and data ethics, thereby contributing to creating high-quality and relevant data for machine learning applications.