Perrone, M. (2025, March 16).
AP News.
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.
It’s the most visible sign of AI’s inroads into health care, where hundreds of hospitals are using increasingly sophisticated computer programs to monitor patients’ vital signs, flag emergency situations and trigger step-by-step action plans for care — jobs that were all previously handled by nurses and other health professionals.
Hospitals say AI is helping their nurses work more efficiently while addressing burnout and understaffing. But nursing unions argue that this poorly understood technology is overriding nurses’ expertise and degrading the quality of care patients receive.
The info is linked above.
Here are some thoughts:
The article details the increasing use of AI in healthcare to automate nursing tasks, sparking union concerns about patient safety and the risk of AI overriding human expertise. Licensing boards cannot license AI products because licensing is fundamentally designed for individuals, not tools. It establishes accountability based on demonstrated competence, which is difficult to apply to AI due to complex liability issues and the challenge of tracing AI outputs to specific actions. AI lacks the inherent personhood and professional responsibility that licensing demands, making it unaccountable for harm.