A registered nurse for more than three decades, Mary Joy Garcia-Dia has witnessed how the healthcare landscape has evolved and how technology has redesigned the way doctors and nurses interact and manage medical decisions with their patients through healthcare informatics and decision support systems like AI. To a layman, for instance, the use of clipboards to note down patient information has now been replaced by a system that is generated by machines known as Artificial Intelligence (AI) augmenting human intelligence and critical thinking. She explained how AI has revolutionized healthcare: “While the nurse or doctor is interacting with the mother of a patient, they can see patient’s past medical history and any change from the last time the patient was brought to the hospital using the electronic medical record.

We are already interacting with ‘Alexa’ in our daily life and imagine its use in healthcare with alert reminders like going to doctor or taking our pills specially for hypertensive or diabetic patients.” The use of AI may have started way back in the late 1950s to 1970s, she told The FilAm. But it was only in recent years that its adoption was accelerated in healthcare.

As evidenced in pop culture, AI is seen as posing a threat to our way of life, for instance, portending to alter the way news is delivered and is viewed as a risk to privacy and its ethical use. Garcia-Dia herself became fascinated with expert systems as an Intensive Care Unit nurse at Bel.