The next time you owe a medical exam, you can receive a call from someone like Ana: a friendly voice that can help you prepare for your appointment and answer any pressing questions you may have.
With its quiet and warm behavior, Ana has been trained to reassure patients, such as many nurses in the United States, but unlike them, it is also available for chat 24-7, in multiple languages, from Hindi to Haitian Creole.
That is because Ana is not humanBut a Artificial Intelligence Program Created by Hipcratic AI, one of several New companies Offering ways to automate the tasks that require a lot of time generally made by nurses and medical assistants.
It is the most visible sign of Ai increases in medical carewhere they use hundreds of hospitals increasingly sophisticated computer programs To monitor the vital signs of patients, patient emergency situations and trigger step -by -step action plans for care, work that were previously handled by nurses and other health professionals.
Hospitals say that AI is helping their nurses to work more efficiently while adding exhaustion and lack of personnel. But nursing unions argue that this little understood technology is annulled the experience of nurses and degrading the quality of the care that patients receive.
“Hospitals have been waiting for the moment they have something that seems to have enough legitimacy to replace nurses,” said Michelle Mahon from National Nurses United. “The entire ecosystem is designed to automate, deactivate and finally replace caregivers.”
The Mahon group, the largest nursing union in the US, has helped organize more than 20 manifestations in hospitals throughout the country, pressing for the right to say how AI can be used, and protection against discipline if they decide to ignore automated advice. The group gave new alarms in January when Robert F. Kennedy Jr.The Secretary of Health incoming, suggested that the nurses of AI “as good as any doctor” could help provide care in rural areas. On Friday, Dr. Mehmet OzThat he has been nominated to supervise Medicare and Medicaid, said he believes that AI can “release doctors and nurses from all over the paperwork.”
The hypocratic AI initially promoted a $ 9 rate per hour for their AI attendees, compared to approximately $ 40 per hour for a registered nurse. Since then, he has dropped that language, instead promoting their services and seeking to assure customers who have been carefully proven. The company did not give requests for an interview.
Hospitals have been experiencing for years with technology designed to improve attention and rationalize costs, including sensors, microphones and movement detection cameras. Now that the data is being linked to electronic medical records and are analyzed in an effort to predict medical problems and direct the attention of nurses, sometimes before evaluating the patient.
Adam Hart was working in the emergency room in Dignity Health in Henderson, Nevada, when the hospital computer system marked a newcomer patient for sepsis, a potentially deadly reaction to infection. Under the hospital protocol, a large dose of intravenous fluids should immediately administer. But after a more detailed exam, Hart determined that he was treating a dialysis patient or someone with kidney failure. These patients should be carefully handled to avoid overloading their kidneys with liquid.
Hart raised his concern for the supervisory nurse, but he was told to only follow the standard protocol. Only after a nearby doctor intervened, the patient began to receive a slow infusion of IV fluids.
“You must keep your thought limit, that’s why they pay you as a nurse,” Hart said. “Directing our thought processes to these devices is reckless and dangerous.”
Hart and other nurses say they understand the objective of AI: to facilitate nurses monitoring multiple patients and quickly responding to problems. But the reality is often a flood of false alarms, sometimes erroneously marking basic body functions, such as a patient who has an intestinal movement, as an emergency.
“You are trying to concentrate on your work, but then you get all these distraction alerts that can mean something,” said Melissa Beebe, a cancer nurse at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. “It is difficult to even know when it is necessary and when it is not because there are so many false alarms.”
Even the most sophisticated technology will miss the signs that nurses are routinely admitted, such as facial expressions and smells, says Michelle Collins, dean of the Faculty of Nursing of the University of Loyola. But people are not perfect either.
“It would be nonsense to turn your back on this,” said Collins. “We must adopt what you can do to increase our attention, but we must also be careful that the human element does not replace.”
According to an estimate, more than 100,000 nurses left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic, the greatest estimate, the largest personnel fall in 40 years. As the American population ages and nurses retire, the United States government estimates that there will be more than 190,000 new openings for nurses every year until 2032.
Faced with this trend, hospital administrators see that AI occupies a vital role: not assuming attention, but helping nurses and doctors to collect information and communicate with patients.
At the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences at Little Rock, employees must make hundreds of calls every week to prepare patients for surgery. Nurses confirm information about recipes, heart conditions and other problems, such as sleep apnea, which must be carefully reviewed before anesthesia.
The problem: many patients only respond to their phones at night, usually between dinner and bedtime at their children.
“So, what we must do is find a way to call several hundred people in a 120 -minute window, but I really don’t want to pay my staff overtime to do it,” said Dr. Joseph Sanford, who supervises the health of the center.
Since January, the hospital has used an qventus assistant to contact patients and health suppliers, send and receive medical records and summarize their contents for human personnel. Qventus says that 115 hospitals are using their technology, whose objective is to boost hospital gains through faster surgical changes, less cancellations and reduced exhaustion.
Each call begins with the program that is identified as AI assistant.
“We always want to be completely transparent with our patients who are sometimes talking to a human and sometimes,” said Sanford.
While companies such as Qventus provide an administrative service, other developers of AI see a more important role for their technology.
The Israeli Startup Xoltar specializes in human avatars that perform video calls with patients. The company is working with the Mayo Clinic in an AI assistant that teaches cognitive techniques to control chronic pain. The company is also developing an avatar to help smokers. In early tests, patients have spent about 14 minutes talking to the program, which can collect facial expressions, body language and other signals, according to Xoltar.
Nursing experts studying AI say that such programs can work for relatively healthy and proactive people about their care. But that is not most people in the health system.
“It is the patients who are taking most of the medical care in the US. And if the chatbots are positioned or not for those people it is something we really have to consider,” said Roschelle Fritz, of the Davis Nursing School of the University of California.
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