According to a report from NBC Bay Area, nurses have gathered by the San Francisco medical center Kaiser on Monday morning to protest the use of artificial intelligence. They are concerned about the safety of patients. Also they are unhappy with how fast AI is being implemented in hospitals and they’ve labeled it as untested and unregulated technology. The protest had hundreds of registered nurses and members of the California Nurses Association (CNA).
Nurses against AI technology
One of the hospitals that started to integrate AI is Kaiser SP hospital. On their website, Kaiser references a monitoring system that analyzes a patient’s vital signs and other data and based on the results, it will alert the healthcare team responsible for the patient. Kaiser says the equipment helps in saving lives.
On the other hand, nurses are not happy at all. They say that AI will never replace a human’s care since it can’t detect the needs of a patient. A registered nurse named Amy Grewal said that “No computer, no AI can replace a human touch. It cannot hold your loved one’s hand. You cannot teach a computer how to have empathy.” But technology experts think that AI will make it easy and fast for doctors to diagnose and treat patients.
“It is deeply troubling to see Kaiser promote itself as a leader in AI in healthcare, when we know their use of these technologies comes at the expense of patient care, all in service of boosting profits,” said Michelle Gutierrez Vo, a registered nurse and CNA president.
In response to the protest, Kaiser medical center released the following statement:
“Kaiser Permanente is empowering nurses with state-of-the-art tools and technologies that support our mission of providing high-quality, affordable health care to best meet our members’ and patients’ needs. We have consistently invested in and embraced technology that enables nurses to work more effectively, resulting in improved patient outcomes and nurse satisfaction, and we will continue to do so.”
Is AI hurting or helping the nursing profession?
AI is a helpful technology however, it could take over jobs completely. Last month, Nvidia announced that it’s collaborating with Hippocratic AI to create empathetic healthcare agents. Those agents could have a better human connection with patients via super-low latency conversational reactions. They will cost less hourly and outperform human nurses on video calls.
Such technology will turn most nurses against AI since it’s coming for a big part of their role. The outcome of using AI technology in the medical field is unknown right now. Some people think it will save lives and make diagnosis and treatment easy. Others see it as a risk to patients and medical staff. The reality is that AI technology is expanding quickly in the healthcare sector, but it will never replace human intuition and connection.