Next time you are because of a medical exam, you can get a call from someone like Anna: a friendly voice that can help you prepare for your appointment and answer any pressing questions you may have.
With its smooth, warm behavior, Anna is trained to relieve patients – like many nurses throughout the US
But unlike them, it is also available to talk 24-7, in numerous languages, from Hindi to Haitian Creole.
This is because Anna is not human, but an artificial intelligence program created by Hippocrates, one of the number of new companies that offer ways to automate tasks that require time usually performed by nurses and medical assistants.
It is the most obvious sign of he in health care, where hundreds of hospitals are using increasingly sophisticated software to monitor patients’ vital signs, flag emergency situations and cause step-by-step action plans that were all previously treated by nurses and other health professionals.
Hospitals say he is helping their nurses work more efficiently while addressing burning and dissatisfaction. But nursing unions argue that this poorly understood technology is exceeding the expertise of nurses and degrades the quality of care that patients receive.
“Hospitals have been waiting for the moment when they have something that seems to have enough legitimacy to replace nurses,” Michelle Mahon said from United Nurses. “The entire ecosystem is created to automate, de-skill and ultimately replace the caretakers.”
The Mahon Group, the largest nursing union in the US, has helped organize more than 20 demonstrations in hospitals across the country, pressuring the right to say how it can be used – and protection from discipline if they decide not to accept automated advice.
The group raised new alerts in January when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Entry Health, suggested the nurses “as good as any doctor” can help provide care in rural areas. On Friday, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has been named to oversee Medicare and Medicaid, said he believes he could “liberate doctors and nurses from all documents”.
Hippocrates initially promoted a rate of $ 9 an hour for his assistants, compared to about $ 40 per hour for a registered nurse. Since then it has fallen that language, instead of seeking its services and seeking to ensure customers have been carefully tested. The company did not file a request for an interview.
He in the hospital can generate fake alarms and dangerous tips
Hospitals have been experimenting for years with technology designed to improve care and steering costs, including sensors, microphones and cameras that feel movement. Now that the data is being linked to electronic medical data and analyzed in an effort to predict medical problems and direct care of nurses – sometimes before they have evaluated the patient himself.
Adam Hart was working in the emergency room at Dignity Health in Henderson, Nevada, when the hospital’s computer system marked a newcomers for sepsis, a life -threatening reaction to infection. According to the hospital protocol, he had to administer a large dose of fluid IV immediately. But after further examination, Hart determined that he was treating a patient with dialysis, or someone with kidney failure. Such patients should be carefully achieved to avoid overloading their kidneys with fluid.
Hart raised his concern with the supervisory nurse, but was told to simply follow the standard protocol. Only after a nearby doctor intervened, the patient instead began to receive a slow infusion of IV fluid.
“You have to keep your thinking lid – that’s why you pay as a nurse,” Hart said. “Returning our thought processes into these devices is reckless and dangerous.”
Mips and other nurses say they understand the purpose of it: make it easier for nurses to monitor many patients and respond quickly to problems. But reality is often a barrage of fake alarms, sometimes making the flag wrongly the basic bodily functions – such as a patient who has an intestinal movement – as an emergency.
“You’re trying to focus on your work, but then you are getting all these attractive announcements that can or may not mean something,” said Melissa Beebe, a cancer nurse at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. “Hard hard to say even when it’s correct and when it doesn’t happen because there are so many false alarms.”
Can he help in the hospital?
Even the most sophisticated technology will lose signs that nurses receive routinely, such as facial expressions and fragrances, notes Michelle Collins, Dean of Loyola University Nursing College. But people are not even perfect.
“It would be stupid to turn our backs completely,” Collins said. “We have to embrace what can do to increase our care, but we also have to be careful that it does not replace the human element.”
More than 100,000 nurses left the workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to one assessment, the largest staff drops to 40 years. While the American population ages and retired nurses, the US government estimates that there will be more than 190,000 new openings for nurses each year by 2032.
In the face of this trend, the hospital administrators find it to meet a vital role: not to care for, but to help nurses and doctors collect information and communicate with patients.
‘Sometimes they’re talking to a man and sometimes aren’t’
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 issues – such as sleep apnea – that should be carefully reviewed before anesthesia.
Problem: Many patients respond only to their evening phones, usually between the dinner and sleep of their children.
“So what we have to do is find a way to call a few hundred people in a 120-minute-but I really don’t want to pay my overtime staff to do so,” Dr. said Joseph Sanford, who oversees the health of the center.
Since January, the hospital has used an assistant to him by Qventus to contact patients and health providers, send and receive medical records and summarize their content for human staff. Qventus say 115 hospitals are using its technology, which aims to increase hospital revenue through faster surgical curves, less cancellation and decrease in combustion.
Calldo call begins with the program that is identified as an assistant.
“We always want to be completely transparent with our patients that sometimes they are talking to a man and sometimes they are not,” Sanford said.
While companies like Qventus are offering an administrative service, other developers to see a bigger role in their technology.
Israeli start Xoltar specializes in man -like avatars who make video calls with patients. The company is working with the Mayo Clinic in an assistant one who teaches patients cognitive techniques for chronic pain management. The company is also developing a avatar to help smokers rest. In early testing, patients have spent about 14 minutes chatting in the program, which can receive facial expressions, body language and other signs, according to Xoltar.
Nursing experts they study say such programs can work for people who are relatively healthy and proactive for their care. But this is not most people in the health system.
“It is very ill those who are taking most of the health care at the US and if the chatbots are positioned for those people is something we really have to consider,” Roschelle Fritz from the University of California Davis School said.
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