Drive Health and Arizona State University Advance the Future of Safe Clinical AI Through the Nurse Assist Initiative

Collaboration establishes the world's first academia-adjacent framework for evaluating, credentialing, and responsibly deploying AI that augments nurses - not replaces them.

GILBERT, Ariz., Nov. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Drive Health today announced a major milestone in its collaboration with Arizona State University's Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, introducing a first-of-its-kind approach to evaluating clinical artificial intelligence through human-style nursing competency assessments.

As healthcare organizations rapidly adopt AI, one critical question remains largely unanswered:

How do we determine whether an AI assistant is truly safe, trustworthy, and ready to support clinicians in patient care?

Through the Nurse Assist Initiative, Drive Health and ASU's Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation are working to answer that question by developing a new framework that evaluates AI using many of the same educational principles, competency assessments, and simulated clinical experiences used to prepare future nurses.

Unlike traditional AI benchmarks that primarily measure knowledge or reasoning, this framework evaluates how an AI assistant performs in complex patient-care scenarios, mirroring how nursing students are assessed in ASU's accredited Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. Beyond demonstrating knowledge, the AI assistant must navigate simulated clinical cases, respond to ambiguous risks, communicate effectively with patients, connect them with care teams when needed and support clinicians within clearly defined governance boundaries.

The initiative is designed around a simple but important principle: AI should strengthen the nursing workforce - not replace it.

"The future of healthcare isn't human versus AI - it's human plus AI," said Kevin Longoria, CEO and Co-Founder of Drive Health. "But a convincing conversation is not proof that an AI system is ready to augment the workforce. Healthcare demands more than a general-purpose AI packaged with a clinical interface. The responsibility is on technology companies to demonstrate that their systems belong in patient care – not on patients and clinicians to discover their limitations after deployment."

Built on Proven Clinical Safety

The Nurse Assist Initiative builds upon the foundation established by Drive Health's proprietary Deterministic Clinical Engine (DCE) - a governance-first clinical reasoning architecture designed specifically for healthcare.

Unlike generalized conversational AI, the DCE combines deterministic decision pathways, evidence-based clinical guidance, configurable governance policies, and human oversight to ensure patient interactions remain safe, transparent, and auditable. There is no large language model (LLM) utilized for clinical reasoning, therefore eliminating the threat of hallucinations that compromise patient safety.

To date, Drive Health has generated substantial real-world evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach, including:

• More than 980,000 audited interactions
• 100% identification of high-risk (R3) events
• 99.7% accuracy for moderate-risk (R2) events
• Zero missed critical escalations
• Just 0.7% false-positive escalation rate

Rather than replacing clinical judgment, the DCE serves as a governed decision-support foundation that consistently recognizes when human intervention is required.

The collaboration with ASU's nursing college represents the next evolution of this work - moving beyond operational verification to academic evaluation, human-centered research, and competency-based validation.

Creating a New Competency Evaluation Model for Clinical AI

Over the past year, Drive Health and ASU have evaluated the Nurse Assist platform through a progression of increasingly rigorous assessments modeled after nursing education. These efforts have included nursing didactic examinations, clinical reasoning exercises, standardized patient encounters, simulated documentation workflows, and ongoing research examining clinician and patient trust in AI-assisted care.

Together, these activities are helping establish what Drive Health believes will become a new benchmark for responsible healthcare AI: Human-Style AI Standardized evaluations from independent, accredited organizations such as Arizona State University.  

Rather than asking whether AI can generate an answer, the framework evaluates whether it can safely support healthcare professionals in realistic clinical situations while remaining accountable, explainable, and appropriately governed.

"At ASU's Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, we believe nurses must have a voice in shaping the technology they use to care for patients," said Dr. Judith Karshmer, Dean of ASU's Edson College. "A nurse's expertise is critical to ensuring these tools are ethical, practical, responsive to the realities of clinical care and evidence based. That's why we committed to partnering with Drive Health and being involved throughout the development, evaluation and implementation of this agentic nurse assistant. Our hope is that this collaboration helps make it a powerful component of the nurses' toolkit."

Establishing a Blueprint for Responsible AI

As healthcare continues to navigate rapid advances in artificial intelligence, Drive Health and Arizona State University share the belief that technical performance alone is insufficient and that future clinical AI systems must also demonstrate safety, transparency, governance, and measurable competency before being deployed into patient-facing environments.

Working together, Drive Health and ASU's shared goal is for this work to develop a scalable framework that can help health systems, academic institutions, regulators, and technology developers evaluate AI consistently and responsibly.

"Artificial intelligence will continue to reshape health care, but innovation alone isn't enough. AI must earn the trust of the clinicians who use it and the patients they care for," said Dr. Sherine Gabriel, Executive Vice President, ASU Health. "This partnership with Drive Health gives us a unique opportunity to develop an evidence-based approach to evaluating AI that can help other organizations make informed decisions about how and when to use these technologies. The goal isn't simply to advance another AI tool — it's to create something the entire health care community can build on."

Longoria believes this marks an important shift in how healthcare should think about AI adoption.

"Healthcare has established rigorous standards for educating and credentialing clinicians because patient safety depends on it," Longoria said. "We believe AI should be held to similarly rigorous standards. Avery has worked through every course, lecture, quiz and exam in the initiative's educational pathway, completed NCLEX practice exams, and worked alongside nursing student peers in the simulation lab. Their feedback helps us identify what works and what needs improvement. Building trust requires evidence - not promises - and that's exactly what this collaboration is creating."

As the Nurse Assist Initiative continues to expand, Drive Health and ASU expect to further refine the anticipated credentialing methodology through additional research, clinical simulations, and real-world validation - helping establish a practical blueprint for the next generation of safe, ethical, and clinician-centered AI.

Looking Ahead

While the Nurse Assist Initiative is focused on evaluating AI through the lens of nursing education and clinical competency, its implications extend well beyond a single technology, institution, or industry.

As organizations, regulators, payers, accreditation bodies, and insurers grapple with the rapid emergence of AI, the need for objective standards has never been greater. A repeatable framework for measuring competency, governance, safety, and human oversight have the potential to become a foundational element in how AI is evaluated before deployment - and how it is ultimately regulated, insured, accredited, and reimbursed.

Although the future of these standards will be shaped collaboratively across industry, academia, and government, initiatives like Nurse Assist represent an important step toward establishing the evidence-based framework needed to support the responsible adoption of AI throughout healthcare and beyond.

About Drive Health

Drive Health is a healthcare AI company focused on building governance-first artificial intelligence that improves patient engagement, care coordination, and operational efficiency while keeping clinicians at the center of care. Its flagship platform combines its patented Deterministic Clinical Engine with advanced conversational AI to deliver safe, explainable, and scalable clinical support across hospitals, health systems, health plans, and community care organizations.

Learn more about Avery at https://drivehealth.ai/platform/avery and explore Drive Health's clinical AI research at https://drivehealth.ai/research.

About ASU's Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation

The Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation at Arizona State University is distinguished as a model for excellence and inspiration in nursing and interprofessional practice, education and research to advance knowledge and innovative practice models, and new solutions to optimize the health and well-being of our diverse local, national and global communities.

Edson College provides a first-class education for undergraduate and graduate students. Our Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) and Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degrees are ranked by U.S. News and World Report as top programs in the nation

SOURCE Drive Health