Leading AI chip maker Nvidia recently announced a collaboration with AI startup Hippocratic AI to launch AI “agents” meant to replace nurses. At $9 per hour, these AI-powered “nurses” are meant to perform “low-risk,” “patient-facing” duties, mostly via video conversations. This action has generated discussion and worries both inside and beyond the healthcare industry.
Hippocratic AI asserts that these AI agents will not perform diagnostic tasks, but will instead provide aftercare guidance and address patient inquiries. However, some contend that there are inherent risks when leaving medical directions to AI. Although the Nvidia demonstration video shows an apparently faultless interaction between an AI nurse and a patient, some are skeptical about the ethics and dependability of this kind of technology in actual healthcare settings.
Furthermore, others see the choice to replace nurses with AI as a flawed approach to address the shortage of labor in the healthcare industry. Large-scale strikes and protests over the nursing shortage are mostly the result of hospital cost-cutting initiatives, inadequate working conditions, and low pay, not the outrageous nursing salary promoted by Hippocratic AI.
Moreover, there is skepticism surrounding the salary information offered by Hippocratic AI. Even though the organization claims that the total cost per hour for a registered nurse averages at $90, new data obtained from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics demonstrates that the average hourly wage of an RN is way below this amount. This difference creates room to worry about trust and openness issues when relying on start-up datasets such as Hippocratic AI.
In the final analysis, even though AI technologies may seem like a possible panacea for transforming the healthcare sector, replacing human nurses with AI agents requires multifaceted ethical and operational issues. Moreover, addressing the root causes of the nursing shortage problems, such as enhancing working conditions and providing reasonable wages, could prove to be more long-term strategies that result in high-quality patient care.
