Personnel solution for hospitals or a threat to quality care?

Next time you will do a medical exam, you can receive a call from someone like Ana: a friendly voice that can help you prepare for programming and answer any pressing questions you may have.

With her calm and warm behavior, Ana was trained to put patients in her US assistants, but unlike them, she is also available to discuss 24-7, in several languages, from Hindi to Haitian Creole.

That’s because Ana is not a manBut one Artificial Intelligence Program created by the Hippocratic AI, one of several of New companies Offering ways to automate the time -consuming tasks usually performed by nurses and nurses.

Is the most visible sign of You will confuse in health carewhere I use hundreds of hospitals increasingly sophisticated computer programs To monitor the vital signs of patients, the emergency situations of the flag and to trigger the action plans for step-by-care work that have been previously managed by nurses and other health professionals.

Hospitals say you help their nurses work more efficiently while refers to burning and insufficiency. But the medical assistance unions claim that this poorly understood technology is the supervision of the nurses’ expertise and degrade the quality of the patients receiving.

“Hospitals have been waiting for the moment they have something that seems to have sufficient legitimacy to replace the nurses,” said Michelle Mahon, from National National United. “The whole ecosystem is designed to automate, deactivate and finally replace carers.”

Mahon’s group, the largest US assistance union, has contributed to over 20 demonstrations at hospitals throughout the country, making efforts for the right to say in how you can be used – and protection against discipline if they decide not to consider automatic advice. Group raised new alarms in January when Robert F. Kennedy Jr.The secretary of health that came in, suggested to the assistants you have “as good as any doctor” could help provide care in rural areas. Friday, Dr. Mehmet Ozwho was nominated for Medicare and Medicaid surveillance, said he believes that you can “issue doctors and nurses from all documents.”

Hippocratic AI initially promoted a $ 9 per hour rate for its assistants, compared to about $ 40 per hour for a recorded assistant. Since then he has given up this language, instead presented his services and sought to assure the customers that they were carefully tested. The company did not give requests for an interview.

Ai in the hospital can generate fake alarms and dangerous tips

Hospitals have been experimenting for years with technology designed to improve care and more efficient costs, including sensors, microphones and movement detection cameras. Now that the data are related to electronic medical documents and analyzed in the effort to predict medical problems and direct care of the nurses – sometimes before evaluating the patient itself.

Adam Hart worked in the Emergency Chamber of Health dignity in Henderson, Nevada, when the hospital’s computer system reported a new patient for sepsis, a reaction that can put life to infection. Under the hospital protocol, I had to administer a high dose of liquids IV. But after subsequent examination, Hart has established that he treats a patient with dialysis or someone with kidney failure. Such patients should be carefully managed to avoid overloading the kidneys with liquid.

Hart raised his concern with the supervisory nurse, but he said to follow only the standard protocol. Only after a nearby doctor intervened, the patient began to receive a slow infusion of liquid IV.

“You have to keep your thinking cover – that’s why you are paid as a medical assistant,” Hart said. “The return of our processes of thinking to these devices is reckless and dangerous.”

Hart and other nurses say they understand the goal you have: to facilitate nurses to monitor more patients and to respond to problems quickly. But reality is often a dam of false alarms, sometimes erroneously signaling the basic body functions – such as a patient who has a bowel movement – as an emergency.

“Try to focus on your work, but you will receive all these fun alerts that can mean or not,” said Melissa Beebe, a cancer assistant at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. “It is difficult to say even when it is exactly and not because there are so many false alarms.”

Maybe you will help in the hospital?

Even the most sophisticated technology will lack signs that the nurses usually take over, such as facial expressions and smells, notes Michelle Collins, the dean of the Loyola University’s medical assistance college. But people are not perfect either.

“It would be stupid to return completely to this,” Collins said. “We should hug what it can do to increase our care, but we should also be careful not to replace the human element.”

Over 100,000 nurses have left the workforce during the Covid-19 Pandemic, according to an estimate, the highest decrease in staff in 40 years. As the US population and nurses retreat, the US government estimates that there will be more than 190,000 new openings for nurses every year by 2032.

In the face of this tendency, the hospital administrators see AI who fulfills a vital role: do not take care, but helping assistants and doctors to gather information and communicate with patients.

“Sometimes I talk to a man and sometimes not”

At the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences in Little Rock, employees need to make hundreds of calls every week to prepare patients for the operation. The nurses confirm information about recipes, heart disease and other problems – such as sleep apnea – to be carefully reviewed before anesthesia.

The problem: many patients only respond to their phones in the evening, usually between dinner and bed.

“So what we need to do is find a way to call several hundred people in a 120-minute window-but I really don’t want to pay the overtime of my staff to do so,” said Dr. Joseph Sanford, who supervises the health of the center.

Since January, the hospital has used an assistant AI from Qventus to contact patients and health providers, sent and receive medical documents and summarize their content for human employees. Qventus says that 115 hospitals use their technology, which aims to stimulate hospital income through faster surgical changes, fewer cancellations and reduced burns.

Each call begins with the program that identifies as an assistant.

“We always want to be fully transparent with our patients, that sometimes I talk to a man and sometimes not,” said Sanford.

While companies like Qventus offer an administrative service, other developers have a greater role for their technology.

The Israeli Xoltar startup is specialized in human avatars who make video calls with patients. The company works with the Mayo clinic on a assistant who learns cognitive technical patients for managing chronic pain. The company also develops an avatar to help smokers give up. At early testing, patients spent about 14 minutes talking to the program, which can take on facial expressions, body language and other indications, according to Xoltar.

The medical assistance experts who study you say that such programs can work for people who are relatively healthy and proactive in their care. But that’s not the majority of the people in the health system.

“He is very sick who take over most of the medical assistance in the US and whether or not the chatbots are positioned for those people is something we must really take,” said Roschelle Fritz, from the University of California Davis School of Nursing.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Science and Education Group of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The water is the only one responsible for all content.