On September 17, 2024, AMS Healthcare announced its 2024 Compassion and Artificial Intelligence Fellows. This year’s 12 recipients were selected by an external expert review panel and are poised to challenge the status quo and inspire a new era of health care that prioritizes human-centred technological advances. This year, Dr. Marissa Bird, Learning Health System Scientist, IBH, was selected as one of the Compassion and AI Fellows for her work in building compassion in digital nursing mentorship.
Using technology to enable mentorship is a faster and more accessible mechanism of connectivity, allowing novice nurses to find mentorship and connect with a wider array of mentors. In this study, Dr. Bird and her team will speak with novice nurses and nurse mentors at Trillium Health Partners who are using a new digital mentorship application to understand whether and how compassionate nurse mentorship can be delivered using technology. Learnings will be used to inform how the digital mentorship application evolves. It will also help advance scientific understanding of what elements of technology-enabled relationships make them compassionate.
“As a nurse myself, supporting the nursing workforce by advancing our understanding of the types of environments where nurses can thrive is something that I am deeply passionate about,” says Dr. Bird. “I am excited to engage in the creative thinking needed to inspire a future where technology can enhance joy in work and enable nurses to sustain meaningful careers long-term.”
Dr. Bird’s research portfolio focuses on creating transformational health system change by cultivating the capabilities and conditions necessary for learning in healthcare. Particular interests within this field include optimizing innovation capacity within Learning Health Systems; supporting the health workforce; and working in the fields of innovation co-design and evaluation to support learning and sustainability. This year, she was also the recipient of an inaugural Health System Impact Early Career Researcher Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
Innovation is an important component in creating a new kind of health care for a healthier community, and technological advancements are key to helping shape and further transform quality of care, experience and overall outcomes for patients and families. Dr. Bird has made profound contributions in this space, working to optimize human-centred advancements within a Learning Health Systems approach, and we congratulate her on this award!