“Life-and-death decisions relating to patient acuity, treatment decisions, and staffing levels cannot be made without the assessment skills and critical thinking of registered nurses,” the union wrote in the post. “For example, tell-tale signs of a patient’s condition, such as the smell of a patient’s breath and their skin tone, affect, or demeanor, are often not detected by AI and algorithms.”
“Nurses are not against scientific or technological advancement, but we will not accept algorithms replacing the expertise, experience, holistic, and hands-on approach we bring to patient care,” they added.
Way back in 2010 I did some paper reading at university on AI in healthcare, and even back then there were dedicated AI systems that could outperform many healthcare workers in the US and Europe.
Where many of the issues came were not in performance, but in liability. If a single person is liable, that’s fine, but what if a computer program provides an incorrect dosage to an infant, or a procedure with two possible options goes wrong and a human would choose the other?
The problems were also painted as observational. Often, the AI would get things with a clear solution right far more, but would observe things far less. It basically had the same conclusions that many other industries have - AI can produce some useful tools to help humans, but using it to replace humans results in fuck-ups that make the hospital (more notably, it’s leaders) liable.
While I agree AI isn’t a replacement for skilled, human nurses, there are a ton of valid implementations of AI tech in healthcare. I appreciate that they’re just advocating for collaboration with the nursing unions on how this tech is developed and implemented instead of fighting it off fully.
Having worked in this space in the past, on the document and imaging processing side. I was unaware that ai was being used in monitoring.
The dangers I see from the technology side to the end user side is, companies replying on the model data and hiring according, versus skilled nurses using their knowledge and intuition to interpret ai data and responses.
But from purely a processing scope, AI is extremely beneficial, just the lost of tribal knowledge on why we need to use ai will get lost
At least in the US, the healthcare system is fucked-and-a half with staffing issues alone. With boomers on the way out of the work force and into the fucking ER, we’re in trouble.
If ‘AI’ algorithms can help manage the dumpster fire, bring it on. Growing pains are expected, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore its potential.
