What Nurses Should Know From ViVE 2026: AI, Virtual Nursing, and Workflow Tech
- AI is quickly entering nursing workflows. Tools like ambient AI scribes, virtual nurse assistants, and virtual nursing models are already being tested in hospitals.
- Nurses must help design healthcare technology. Many ViVE speakers emphasized that tech solutions fail when nurses aren’t involved in building them.
- New tech could reshape nursing roles. From remote care models to nurse-led startups, technology is expanding how and where nurses can work.
Health tech conferences can feel like a lot of people talking about fixing healthcare without the people who actually run it. But at ViVE this year, nursing workflows kept coming up, and it felt like tech founders had nurses on their radars.
Past the bright booths and AI buzzwords, a few meaningful trends and takeaways emerged that could shape how nurses work in the coming years. Here’s what stood out.
Tech in Nursing
AI and smart tech in nursing is not a matter of “if,” but “when.” Here are the three pieces of tech you will see spreading across hospitals nationwide.
Ambient AI
What is it?
Think of ambient AI as an AI medical scribe.
It listens to clinical conversations and generates documentation in the EHR without you having to check hundreds of clickboxes and flowsheets every shift. Most are designed to run in the background during patient interactions.
Where could it help nurses the most?
- Admission documentation
- Shift notes and care summaries
- Patient education documentation
- Handoffs between nurses
- Reducing after-shift charting
What should we look out for?
If your health system is looking to adopt ambient AI, ask about accuracy, privacy, and consent, and how ambient AI integrates into your health system’s EHR.
Virtual Nurse Assistants
What is it?
A virtual nurse assistant is like an AI version of your brain sheet. It’s designed to support nurses with routine tasks and information retrieval.
Where could it help nurses the most?
- Retrieving answers based on policies and procedures
- Triaging tasks
- Help with answering patient questions that require research
What should we look out for?
If your health system is looking to adopt virtual nurse assistants, ask what tasks the tech will be used for, what models it was trained on, what guardrails are in place to ensure accurate information, and how to report incidents of tech errors.
Virtual Nursing
What is it?
Virtual nursing uses remote nurses connected through video and digital platforms to support bedside teams. It creates a hybrid care model in which some nursing work is done remotely. Many health systems see this as a way to stabilize staffing and improve workflow.
Where could it help nurses the most?
- Admissions
- Discharges
- High-risk patient monitoring
- 1:1 sitting
- Patient education
What should we look out for?
If your health system is looking to implement virtual nursing, ask how the virtual nurses will integrate with your team, where to find a responsibilities matrix, and how this impacts staffing ratios and schedules.
Nurse Panels
ViVE had three panels dedicated specifically to nursing and nurse tech. Here are the top quotes and takeaways from each session.
The Evolution of Nursing in a Tech-Enabled Future
Moderator
Dr. Bonnie Clipper, DNP, MA, MBA, RN, FAAN, Founder, Virtual Nursing Academy, Innovation Advantage
“A CEO used ChatGPT to figure out what the problems are in nursing and said, ‘We created a whole plan and we’re working to that.’ What the heck is wrong with that? You gotta live in our shoes. You gotta figure out what the issues are. And you can’t do that if you’re not talking to nurses. that are in here: Find these nurses.”
Participants
Susan Grant, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN, Chief Clinical Officer, symplr
“ need to upskill ourselves. We need to learn. If we are going to be at the table, we need to prepare to have the dialogue and to be able to translate what we’re hearing so we can meet IT and our vendors halfway, so we are driving solutions.”
Dr. Whitney Staub-Juergens, DNP-HSL, COO, Transformation Operations, HCA Healthcare
“I’m excited about what we don’t know today that we’re going to know tomorrow, and how fast we are learning as a profession…The intelligence that can offer nursing. How we can get time back and work at the top of our license…I’m concerned about chasing technology and change fatigue.”
“We’ve been thinking about technology as something that saves time or that saves money. But I think it empowers nurses with the ability to think and create, and create new ways of doing things… Nurses have traditionally been burdened with tasks and execution…My hope is that as technology comes in, we can go back to doing what we are meant to do.”
Reimagining Nursing Workflows: Giving Time Back to Care
Moderator
Dr. Stephen Ferrara, DNP, RN, FNP, Associate Dean of AI, Columbia University
Participants
Cheristi Cognetta-Rieke, DNP, MBA, RN, Vice Chair, Nursing Enterprise Transformation, Mayo Clinic
“The most friction I see with nurses today is across the fragmentation of the tools and systems they’re using and the tasks they have. It’s not one single bunch of time; it’s smaller increments of minutes and seconds across dozens of patients.”
Tracy Breece, MSN, RN, CENP, NI-BC, CPHIMS, Vice President, Nursing Innovation & AI, Advocate Health
“The art and science of nursing, first and foremost, is the touch, the feel, the senses. All of that is what I see. But I also see things that break my heart. Why? Because of the workload. How many times is a nurse interrupted, trying to search for something, trying to find supplies? All of this time. There are wasted steps. And there’s opportunity.”
Lisa Gulker, DNP, RN, ACNP-BC, Chief Nursing Executive, Oracle
“Technology is the last thing we think about when we go to see a patient. But I hope this work reveals that documentation is too big. We know it’s too big. It’s too easy to create. Once it became digital, it multiplied in the junk drawer.” – Gulker
Nursing and Remote Care: Expanding Care Delivery Beyond the Bedside
Moderator
Oriana Beaudet, DNP, RN, PHN, VP of Innovation, American Nurses Association
Participants
“We want wellbeing around our caregivers. There was a point last year where our census was growing so fast. I called the attending and said, ‘Are you okay?’ and she said, ‘I’ve never had so much support. It is easier to care for my patients with the virtual nurses, with the calls, with the families knowing they don’t have to reach me somehow; they have 24/7 access through the command center with a way to escalate.’”
Angel Bozard, RN, MSN, CENP, CAVRN, CNO, VirtuAlly
“We cannot consider what we’re doing now as the standard of care. The standard of care is five years from now. We need to open our minds to what we can do. If you’re thinking traditional care is going to fix itself, it’s not. is the new standard of care.”
Emma Geiser, RN, Founder, Nurse Fern
“We need to be talking about early and often and continually... If we make this model better for everyone, if choose to go somewhere and do a virtual model for a little while, I see nurses go back . Nursing isn’t something that you move through and you never return to something you enjoy before. When we create something supportive for our staff and patients, that’s sustainable.” – Geiser
Nurse Discourse
Discourse heard throughout conference rooms, on panels, and in networking sessions:
- Nurses must serve as co-captains of up-and-coming tech
- Technology should aid the pursuit of making bedside nursing a desirable profession
- New career options for nurses are continuing to expand through technology
- Nursing advocacy will extend to safe and ethical AI use
Nurse Innovator Pavilion
ViVE featured a Nurse Innovator Pavilion sponsored by Nurse Approved and Symplr to highlight nurse founders, clinician-designed tools, and startups built around real clinical problems.
The nurse pavilion was modest, with small booths, screens, and one or two founders, especially compared with the mega-tech corporate displays featuring magicians, motorcycles, floating exhibits, and endless refreshments.
Nevertheless, the nursing presence commanded attention and proved that, as always, nurses show up. Even without the flash.
Payton Babb, Nurse Journalist, Nurse.org
Featured Nurse Innovator Pavilion Booths
While wandering the nurse pavilion, I snagged a few interviews with innovators and founders.
Kindli Movers
Kathleen Reyes, the CEO and co-founder, and Benson Tran, the Chief Operating Officer, explained how Kindli Movers is a moving-with-care company. Through AI, Kindli Movers uses cognitive behavioral therapy and mental health support to guide individuals through the stressful and overwhelming experience of moving.
Duality Systems
I chatted with Laurel Chiaramonte, the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Nursing Officer of Duality Systems, about what sets them apart from other scheduling systems.
Duality Systems is a scheduling system and algorithm for nurses by nurses. Tired of your unit using a random Excel spreadsheet to handle everyone’s schedule? Duality Systems does it for you, including any scheduling variables, preferences, and staffing ratios at the push of a button.
Humla
Jessica Sylvester, the CEO and founder of Humla Health, shared that Humla is a free-market platform that gives systems and nurses direct access to each other. Humla was built by nurses, for nurses, and allows nurses to have the autonomy to self-schedule, bypassing agencies.
I was curious, from a credentialing aspect, how Sylvester and her team managed to connect nurses to various hospital systems without using an agency model. The way that Humla is working with hospitals to streamline credentialing and onboarding was innovative in and of itself, and I see this model growing within the nursing community.
Manage You
Sarah Bellenger, the founder of Manage You, shared the ultimate solution for the credentialing and paperwork chaos of nursing. Nurses all have to manage diplomas, business documents, certifications, and continuing education to keep their licenses and facility credentials up to date. Manage You takes the pain out of managing these documents and lets you store, manage, and send them to agencies or facilities, all through a secure portal accessed with Face ID.
While I could only guess which cabinet my BLS is hanging out in, Bellenger showed me hers in less than five seconds in her app.
Honorable Mentions
My show floor hours were limited, so I wasn’t able to catch every founder or nurse innovator for an interview. I also connected with some founders who were not officially part of the Nurse Pavilion. Make sure you also check out:
Final Thoughts
The biggest takeaway from ViVE isn’t that AI is coming to healthcare. We already knew that. Even if the AI and tech you’re seeing today are clunky and inaccurate, in a few iterations, they’ll become widely adopted bedside nurse companions.
The real point is that the success or failure of much of this technology will depend on nurses. Tools that reduce documentation burden, support patient communication, and rethink staffing models could reshape daily workflows, but only if nurses help design and adopt them. And if you want to be one of the nurses who help design, implement, or adopt this tech, you’re invited to the table.
Want to know what other conferences you should check out this year? We have a list of 30+ top nursing conferences broken down by specialty and interest groups.
🤔What nursing task would you most want technology to help with or eliminate? Share your thoughts in the discussion forum below!
