The AI Time Out™: A Nurse Executive’s Seven-Point Framework for Safe, Compliant, and Defensible in Healthcare

A surgeon does not make the incision until the room goes still.For nearly thirty years as a surgical nurse, Karen Duroseau called the surgical time out. Sixty seconds. Every case. No exceptions. It is the most reliable safety ritual in medicine, and it exists because good people inside excellent hospitals still operated on the wrong patient.Healthcare is now adopting artificial intelligence with no equivalent pause.The AI Time Out(TM) takes the discipline that made surgery safe and turns it into a governance framework any leader can run. Seven verifications, in plain language, before you let a system make a call that touches a patient.People. Who does this actually affect? Room. Where is it authorized to operate? Extent. What exactly is it allowed to do? Preparedness. Is it ready to be trusted? Principal. Who is in charge of it? Evidence. Is it on the record? Decision. Is it cleared to proceed?Together they form The P.R.E.P.P.E.D. Framework, and you can run all seven in a single meeting this week.Written for the executives, compliance leaders, clinical directors, board members, and nurses who carry the weight when something goes wrong. Short by design. This is a field guide, not a textbook. Every chapter ends with the questions to ask, who belongs in the room, the evidence to collect, the red flags, and when to say not yet.Because most AI failures in healthcare did not happen because the technology was evil or the people were careless. They happened because no one called the time out.