In 2026, The Health Management Academy’s AI Catalyst team surveyed 52 U.S. health systems to understand how AI is currently deployed, where it is generating ROI, and how leaders are making AI investment decisions. The full benchmark covers 633 AI use case deployments across six categories in the health system, including nursing clinical workflows.
Nursing Catalyst analyzed the nursing-specific data to find trends in the current and future landscape of AI. The nursing data includes 39 respondents, each from a different health system, and 76 AI use case deployments across five main nursing clinical use cases: clinical decision support, ambient nursing documentation, AI falls prevention, AI-generated handoff reports, and patient access and scheduling.
When comparing the status of AI deployments in nursing with the rest of the health system, two main findings emerged:
Nursing has a small share of the health system’s AI deployments (just 12%)
Nursing’s adoption of AI relative to other functional areas surveyed is lagging, meaning nursing has fewer use cases that have moved from the planning and consideration phase into the pilot, limited, or enterprise-wide rollout phase
Given this current state of AI deployment, nursing leaders are looking for ways to increase their AI footprint and maximize efficiency, while competing for limited resources within the health system.