Regulating Disruptive Technologies: Oxymoron or Essential Evolution?

This article focuses on artificial intelligence, robots, and wearable technologies as cutting-edge, disruptive technological innovations poised to impact the regulation of professions. While the article discusses these innovations from a nursing perspective, the issues raised can apply to any healthcare discipline. Accordingly, it is essential for regulatory bodies to explore how these potentially disruptive innovations will be regulated. Finding regulatory solutions is necessary if today's industrial-era regulatory model is to evolve into one fit for a rapidly-changing, complex digital environment where healthcare delivery is increasingly dependent on new technologies. Having considered the wider literature on how regulators address disruptive innovation, we conclude the nursing profession, and regulated professions in general, can learn from these experiences. Model acts and rules, scopes of practice, sunset reviews, and leading-edge research provisions facilitate more agile and recursive responses to these emergent technologies.