AI Nurses

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As a patient, do you look forward to AI nurses? Would this make medical care more approachable and more available to some or all people?

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As AI nurses reshape hospital care, human nurses are pushing back

Story by MATTHEW PERRONE •

The next time you’re due for a medical exam you may get a call from someone like Ana: a friendly voice that can help you prepare for your appointment and answer any pressing questions you might have.

With her calm, warm demeanor, Ana has been trained to put patients at ease — like many nurses across the U.S. But unlike them, she is also available to chat 24-7, in multiple languages, from Hindi to Haitian Creole.

That’s because Ana isn’t human, but an artificial intelligence program created by Hippocratic AI, one of a number of new companies offering ways to automate time-consuming tasks usually performed by nurses and medical assistants.

Link to full article about AI nurses

I would love a text-based AI for a nurse if the interactions were as smooth as with the major LLMs like Gemini & ChatGPT today. I feel like those AI models understand me better than 95% of human professionals already.

I agree.

I avoid going to the doctor for even the simple maintenance stuff now because of cost, distrust, and waiting room contamination. I think I would feel safer at home using a reputable AI program when one becomes available.

There are many people in the US who don’t have health care and this could provide an affordable option for them.

I wonder if AI assessments would allow adults to be identified with autism sooner.

I kind of agree with this. I already use an AI chatbot to get answers to specific medical questions, which is often all I want. Human health professionals don't always have the time to cater for such things in person, though I've had some success interrogating a consultant via an online portal.

What's nice about AI is that I don't feel pressurised into taking its advice. Humans can be rather arrogant and they sometimes feel that the client shouldn't think for themselves. AI generally warns the user "don't forget I can make mistakes, so check out important information." I've known doctors to insinuate the exact opposite of that, yet when they do make mistakes there's rarely any redress.

There's no problem about keeping the consultation brief so as not to waste the health professional's precious time (I don't mean that pejoratively, there aren't enough of them and they're often overworked, so their time really is precious). You can take all the time you need and the AI will patiently wait for your next question, so you can go into as much depth as you want without it making moves to get rid of you so it can see the next client. Of course confidentiality might be less secure, so I never talk about myself to AI, it's all hypothetical, impersonal questions.

I suppose an actual AI nurse will be a bit different though. You'll be able to send pictures of your sore thumb or whatever, and you'll probably have to identify yourself and give personal information. And if you don't take its advice then it might well get back to the humans in the health service, though I don't suppose it'll bother them as much as it does when your regular doctor urges you to do something and you refuse.

Certainly in the UK there's a big problem with money in the NHS, so they're forever letting patients down by fobbing them off and rationing their services, so anything that can cut their costs is worth a look, assuming it would ever translate to better healthcare. As for the USA, it seems you can have all the professionals' time you want as long as you pay them for it, so patients tend to ration themselves if they can't afford the money. Again, my concern is about whether or not the savings would get passed on to the patients or whether the service providers and insurance companies would pocket everything.

I feel sorry for the nurses if AI is going to replace them, but that's more a fault of the system than of AI. In a civilised society, redundancy wouldn't be the door to financial hardship or feeling like you've been thrown away like a used tea bag. Trouble is, we've got the system we've got, and making it better seems impossible, so in practice I think the elite will use AI as a means of pruning the workforce without taking responsibility for the welfare of the staff they shed, like they've always done when a labour-saving device is invented.

Doubtful, these AI have to be trained on something and that's likely just going to perpetuate the current misdiagnosis problem. And possibly make it worse as it would be using the current dirty dataset to train on.

That being said, I do think that AI could potentially be useful in terms of spotting specific traits that show up when the diagnostician isn't around. For example, perhaps tracking how many times people get just stuck staring off into space.

But, using AI to do actual diagnosis is a lot harder than people realize. I doubt we'll get to the point where they can actually handle unusual or rare cases any time soon. I remember when I had a heat stroke and severe sodium deficiency that they had no idea initially what was going on because I was throwing up color fluids. They did work out that it was sports drink, but initially they thought it might have been a suicide attempt. By the time I came out of the coma they put me in, they had already worked out that it was extremely low sodium levels leading to the brain starting to shut down.

I doubt very much that an AI would be able to handle that. Although, I do think that AI could probably datamine through large amounts of records to identify clusters of symptoms and traits that seem to go together for further research.

If properly trained using established medical ethics, they probably wouldn't keep it a secret from the patient at the least.

Yes, that is a logical conclusion. Also, AI literally operates on logic. Infinite analysis of data networks and flow charts. The algorithms move with greater speed and accuracy than humans in game theory design and development so it stands to reason that AI will provide better care in healthcare ultimately.

Already people are connecting more closely psychologically with ChatGPT and other similar resources. Even knowing that the responses are AI generated. Already the algorithms are teaching us.

That's been my experience too. Thank you!