As AI nurses reshape hospital care, human nurses are pushing back
apnews.com
The next time you get a call about an upcoming medical appointment you may not be talking to a human.

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.

  • Chozo@fedia.io
    10·
    2 days ago

    I assume that this is using a highly-curated, custom model, and not some off-the-shelf GPT that just anybody can use, so it probably won’t be suggesting that patients eat glue or anything crazy.

    From what I can tell, it sounds like this is actually a fairly valid use for a chatbot, handling a lot of the tedious tasks that nurses are charged with. Most of what it seems to be doing, any untrained receptionist could also do (like scheduling appointments or reading dosage instructions), so this would free up nurses for actually important tasks like administering medications and triaging patients. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to be issuing prescriptions or anything where real judgement would be necessary.

    As long as hospital staff are realistic about what tasks the chatbot should handle, this actually seems like a pretty decent place to implement a (properly-tuned) LLM.

    • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      LLM training is expensive, so are prompt ”engineers”. This will be the cheapest off-the-shelf LLM they can find, prompted by someone’s nephew. People will be eating glue.