What is changing next
About 20 minutes · plain language
AI is changing what health professionals, educators and researchers spend their time on. This final lesson looks at what is changing, what is becoming more valuable, and how to prepare.
- Describe how AI is changing the work of clinicians, educators and researchers.
- Plan the skills you will need.
Key terms
- Workforce
- The people who deliver health care and education.Example: Nurses, physicians, educators, researchers.
- Verification
- Checking that information is correct and comes from a trustworthy source.Example: Confirming data and references before publication.
- Provenance
- Where information or data came from and how it was produced.Example: Knowing which instrument and which patients produced a dataset.
- Living guidance
- Guidance that is updated regularly as evidence and technology change.Example: RAISE and TRIPOD-LLM.
- Real-world evaluation
- Testing a tool’s effect in everyday practice, not only its accuracy on a test set.Example: Measuring whether an alert improves patient outcomes.
What is getting cheaper
Producing text is becoming almost free: drafting, summarising, translating, formatting and first-pass searching. These tasks will take less human time.
What is becoming more valuable
What AI cannot do on its own becomes more valuable: checking and verifying, clinical judgement, good data and sound methods, ethical decisions, relationships with patients, and taking responsibility. The figure shows this shift.
From tools that answer to tools that act
The next step after chatbots is AI agents that carry out tasks across systems, and AI scribes that listen to every consultation (Lesson 3). As AI moves from suggesting to acting, the key safety questions become who approves each action, how actions are logged, and how quickly a person can stop them.
Work
AI will take over parts of documentation and routine information work. The time saved can return to patients, but only if organisations plan for it. Otherwise it simply becomes more work.
Education
Health-sciences education will need to teach and assess judgement, verification and responsible AI use directly, in ways AI cannot do for the student (Lesson 9).
Research and publishing
Writing a paper is becoming cheap; trustworthy data, sound methods and honest reporting are not. Expect more checks of integrity and provenance, many of them automated, while human accountability stays at the centre of every guideline in this library. WHO has also begun to examine how AI may support, or distort, the use of evidence in health policy.
Rules
Guidance is moving from voluntary principles to binding law and journal policy. Evaluation is moving from test-set accuracy to real-world effect and equity. Much of the guidance is now “living” and changes every few months, so return to this library.
Case: a faculty plans ahead
A nursing faculty decides to add a short AI-literacy thread to every year of its programme. In year one students learn what AI is and how to check it; in year three they critique an AI tool on placement; in year four they write an AI-use policy for a ward. Each course replaces one take-home essay with an oral defence of the student’s reasoning.
Common mistakes
- Waiting for perfect rules before learning.
- Assuming AI will either replace everyone or change nothing.
Check your understanding
1. Name two skills that become more valuable as AI makes writing cheap.
For example: verification, clinical judgement, sound methods, ethical decision-making, taking responsibility.
2. What does “living guidance” mean?
Guidance that is updated regularly as evidence and technology change.
Try it
- Write down one task in your work that AI could take over, and one skill you want to strengthen because AI cannot do it.
Remember
- Producing text is getting cheap; checking and judging are getting more valuable.
- Rules are moving from principles to binding law.
- Keep learning: the guidance changes every few months.
- World Health Organization. Artificial intelligence and evidence-informed policy: emerging challenges and opportunities. Discussion paper. Geneva: WHO; 2026. www.who.int
- United Nations High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence. Governing AI for humanity: final report. New York: United Nations; 2024. digitallibrary.un.org
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act). Official Journal of the European Union. 2024; as amended in 2026. eur-lex.europa.eu
- World Health Organization. Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health: guidance on large multi-modal models. Geneva: WHO; 2024. www.who.int
- Topol EJ. High-performance medicine: the convergence of human and artificial intelligence. Nat Med. 2019;25(1):44-56. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- NHS England. Guidance on the use of AI-enabled ambient scribing products in health and care settings. London: NHS England; 2025 (updated 2026). www.england.nhs.uk
Lesson text is our own plain-language summary of these sources; it is not endorsed by their authors. Check the original before relying on any detail.