Congratulations to Assistant Professor Melanie Sage and her colleagues on the publication of their discussion paper, "Artificial Intelligence for Health Professions Educators" for the National Academy of Medicine Perspectives.

Lomis, K., Jeffries, P., Palatta, A., Sage, M., Sheikh, J., Sheperis, C., & Whelan, A. (2021). Artificial intelligence for health professions educators. NAM Perspectives. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already impacting many facets of American life and is poised to dramatically alter the maintenance of health and the delivery of health care. The explosion of information available to inform the work of health professionals exceeds each individual’s capacity to process it effectively [1]. Learning to wield collective knowledge to augment their own personal abilities will distinguish the health provider of the future from the health provider of the past. AI will help enable this evolution by supplementing—not supplanting—the savvy provider. All health professions have an opportunity to leverage AI tools to optimize the care of patients and populations.

In 2019, the National Academy of Medicine released a Special Publication titled Artificial Intelligence in Health Care: The Hope, the Hype, the Promise, the Peril [2]. Intended to support the vision of a learning health system, the authors addressed “the need for physicians, nurses, and other clinicians, data scientists, health care administrators, public health officials, policy makers, regulators, purchasers of health care services, and patients to understand the basic concepts, current state of the art, and future implications of the revolution in AI and machine learning.”[3] This manuscript is intended to complement the prior Special Publication and serve as a call to action to the health professional education (HPE) community. Educators must act now to incorporate training in AI across health professions or risk creating a health workforce unprepared to leverage the promise of AI or navigate its potential perils.