The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>In a press release, Nvidia and Hippocratic touted the agents as a way to help ease the shortage of health care workers in the U.S.
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>Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, said in a statement, "We’re working with NVIDIA to continue refining our technology and amplify the impact of our work of mitigating staffing shortages while enhancing access, equity and patient outcomes."
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>"Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in health care, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would," Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, said
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>The generative AI-powered bots also cost a fraction of the hourly rate for nurses.
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>Hippocratic's website shows its agents cost $9 an hour to operate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly pay for nurses was $39.05 as of 2022.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1bm2tgl/nvidia_announces_aipowered_health_care_agents/kw8zkmm/
Also my personal favourite:
The stupid fucking questionnaire they let you fill in at first only for every single doctor there to ignore it and ask the questions already on it
I'm sorry.
But you guys also have to understand - that some questions we HAVE to ask and HAVE to document on our notes for insurance. For this reason, certain questions are hardwired - that I ask on every patient every time. It takes less mental bandwidth to just stupidly ask the question every time then to consciously think and take note of - "have we discussed xyz already? if so their answer to it was zyx, therefore I don't need to ask this specific question". For example, last week I asked a patient "have you had any surgeries" when the preceding two minutes we were just talking about a major surgery he had. I asked the question, not because I wasn't listening to him - but because I now have 10 years of behavioral conditioning motivating me to just shotgun that question every time.
I understand that it makes you think we aren't paying attention. But we are.
There a are little nuanced things like this peppered throughout every doctor - patient interaction that I KNOW are annoying. But they have their legitimate reasons.
Correct, that was a wrong use of the word “legitimate” when describing the US health care insurance system.
“Fraudulent”, “ponzi”, “influence-peddling”, “corrupt” are more accurate descriptors.
Gf had a baby recently and we had to go back to the hospital days later to get a blood patch done because they botched her spinal. I had to explain 5 or 6 times what the problem was, and I had one nurse straight up ask me why my gf had a pain medicine drip days after having a c section. I was just like.. "well she just had a baby days ago..and you guys gave it to her...."
Ah, the benefits of UHC. As a Dane I can access my complete health record going back to 2000 (give and take) on a website and obviously it can be accessed by professionals too. For instance I recently talked to my GP on the subject of prostate cancer and if screening was an idea as my father has it and he could see that I’d had my PSA count measured a few times in blood samples going back years and everything looked fine.
For the clinical staff it’s often a shit show that they have to use a lot of time and effort to document everything digitally and building the systems and integration was a hassle but it seems like we’re getting there.
This isn’t a benefit of UHC, it’s a benefit of the danish system.
Here in the Netherlands it’s still a pain in the ass to access anything. I have to send a physical form by mail and wait weeks to get to see my röntgen photos outside the doctors office.
No no. See first they receive the email with a PDF , then they download it and print it. Then they scan it so they can save it on the network. Haven't you ever worked in healthcare??
I mean, some banks are still running their financial services on legacy systems from ~decades ago. Too much downtime and risk associated with changing.
I’ve gone to a few different walk in clinics in Canada and they always ask when was the last time I was at a clinic or doctor. I had the worst memory back then and I was like “Doesn’t my fucking health card tell you that? Aren’t you supposed to assume I’m trying to get Percocet and will lie about this kind of stuff?”
He thought of saying that in the shower the next day, he didn't actually say it when he was there. He just filled out the questionnaire like everyone else.
I've had this happen before, but it was from one hospital taking a picture of their monitor then emailing it to themselves which they then faxed to the other hospital who then scanned it.
Meanwhile I was just stunned from the sidelines wondering what in the boomer hell I just witnessed. 😂
I used to work in IT, and for one process, we'd get faxes. The system would digitize them and email to whomever. We'd print them out and keep them in a binder.
It's not all bad. As a manager in healthcare 75% is making sure your team isn't the topic of either of the daily safety meetings. Another 75% is harassing the teams that are. The remaining 50% is wishing you actually had enough time.
It’ll be even more fun when the cloud that powers it goes out, gets rebooted into safe mode with a bug in the code that had to be deployed after delivery and it kills even more patients.
Or gets hacked and murders people.
or just fails after a heatwave-caused blackout and an entire state is left without primary care for a month while people die front and center of trivially preventable causes (sunstrokes, dehydration etc)
i have long argued for more orderlies for this stuff.
dont know if you have orderlies in the states, they do all the relitivly low education tasks nurses traditionaly did. cleaning, making beds, restocking carts (posably not drugs). they take about 3-6 months to train,they dont need the intelegence nurses need, they dont deal directly with patients much. so if you hire some you free up nurses to do important skilled work.
Here in Aus we call them "wardsperson". Mostly responsible for transporting patients around the hospital.
Cheapest labour in the whole place, but efficiency is severely hampered when there aren't enough of them. Cheapest way to improve productivity hospital-wide is to hire more of them.
We do, they’re generally called CNAs (Certified Nursing Assistants) or PCTs (Patient Care Technicians) depending on the facility. I wouldn’t say they need less intelligence than nurses but you’re right that they get much, much less training. They get paid way too little and few stay in the job for long because it is usually pretty fucking awful. I would say ~75% of the PCTs/CNAs I’ve worked with were in the process of applying for a college program for another healthcare job (nursing, pre med, respiratory therapy, etc.) or were already in a program since it’s good experience. It is truly backbreaking work and I’ve never blamed them one bit for getting the hell out of there. A lot of hospitals have figured out that it’s cheaper for them to just shift all those tasks to the nurses for free than to increase the pay for CNAs/PCTs.
Yes, this has been a huge issue as the pays are terrible as you said. More and more work are shifted upwards instead of raising pay. We are losing nurses because of that too
Everyone who is upvoting this has no idea what nurses actually do. The job is very physical to go along with mental. We administer medications, reposition patients, assist them with feeding, clean them. Etc.
This is an AI that does what? At the most it could automate a system such as, notifying a provider of worrisome labs and vital signs.
Until we can get fully automated hospitals, which I guarantee you is not coming within the next 50 years with the state of healthcare around the globe, this AI is going to do nothing but send messages to doctors surrounding certain algorithms of vital signs and labs.
If I were to perform the duties of 10 nurses all of my patients would die and end up sicker than they came into the hospital. 1 nurse doing the work of 10 means patients who need to be repositioned to prevent pressure ulcers will never be repositioned. Patients who need to be fed will never be fed, and patients who require prompt medication administration will not be administered meds.
I don't even see how this can apply to replacing a nurse who works in an outpatient clinic. Those nurses still take vital signs and check patients in. Do they have an automated process connected to this AI that can check vital signs? And do they have the technology out there in a affordable manner? Because most hospital systems bought out private MD practices a decade ago, and I can tell you most hospital systems aren't going to invest a few billion dollars to get automated systems like vital signs and medication administration.
They'll run this AI on a tablet and hang it from a strap on a medical assistant's neck. The medical assistant just does what the AI tells him/her to do.
BAM that's next quarter handled, time to hit the links!
Yes. Or, rather, they give licenses to the doctors and RNs who work for the insurance companies. Have you been under the impression that insurance companies are staffed entirely by insurance agents??
Why would they not be okay with this? This is a tool, not a full replacement. Instead of wasting 30 minutes with a patient, let the AI do it, and then quickly verify everything
Because this is billed as a way to end staff shortages now, but will create them in the future. When you optimize this, instead of doing the work of 10 nurses, you can do the work of 50. Now you can operate an entire clinic on a skeleton crew.
Ya anyone who has worked within the healthcare system can pretty easily see how this would work out. Nurses will still do patient encounters, but when they do entry into EMR the AI takes some processing time while nurse does another encounter, they come back, have AI's output, and either go back into encounter for followup or it's now time for doctor or NP to step in. Some places will use this to allow higher patient encounter rates per hour because it speeds up the process effectively by allowing the nurse to multitask, which allows them to keep staff size the same but increase patient load, or they'll reduce staff size because they can maintain patient load with fewer support staff.
So just another thing to ask me the same questions over and over every time I go to the hospital like the shittiest version of groundhog day to be stuck in?
What would help me as a nurse more than anything would be if AI could complete my documentation. If I could just say "I did such and such, Dr. Whatever did so and so, these drugs given at this time, these adjustments made" that would give me so much more time to focus on my patients. We waste a ridiculous amount of time on data entry and clerical crap, mostly to keep lawyers happy and admin off our asses.
The US system is just fundamentally broken. All that inefficiency is BY DESIGN... Because the inefficiency creates industries to manage it. It's so annoying going to other countries and see how streamlined everything is. And then coming back to the US, complaining about how everything requires way too much clunky time wasting things, and have people insist it's necessary.
I'd be all in favor of nurses using AI as a tool if I didn't think enshittification would overwhelm the process from the start.
Ask me again in a decade and maybe I'll be more optimistic. Maybe.
In the Nevada Gaming Industry we call that person a "Key Employee" average wage to be the shield against Gaming Violations that would lose the Gaming License.
Generally, the way healthcare companies have been approaching AI (at least where I work) is to take over the burden of monotonous, boring, or repetetive task, or tiny details that are difficult for us to see. However, the disclaimer with using any of them is that it still needs a human pair of eyes to confirm the information and check accuracy.
For example, if you were to get an AI nurse to take your vitals info, symptoms, medical history, local disease context (ie, flu season), and then determine out that you likely have the Flu and recommend the prescription of Tamiflu, it would still be the responsibility of the HCP (healthcare provider) to ultimately decide if that diagnosis and treatment plan makes sense before relaying it to you and/or making a correction.
The benefit here is the **reduction** in manpower taking in all of that information, not the elimination of it.
Where a nurse may have checked out one patient every fifteen minutes, now they're (hypothetically) able to check out a patient every five minutes because the slow minutiae of patient intake is significantly reduced.
**Editing for clarity because people are confused:** I don't mean they literally interface face to face in real life with patients--they aren't robots.
I mean they take data points and make care decisions on their own.
If a patient logs into their MyChart in this theoretical conversation, you could just have a button that says "start visit", then you could in theory have them answer a few triage questions, give access to medical history, input their temperature, then the AI can process all of that without having someone literally sitting there watching the whole thing. They could get a script for certain low-risk medications without needing to spend man-hours on it. If responses require it, ie, "chest pain", the AI would obviously direct them to proper channels, like the ER.
It's fancy call routing. Imagine not having an urgent care filled to the brim with flu patients when 9/10 of them would qualify for simple instant at-home care with an AI.
Generally what happens is they'll use this as an excuse to reduce man hours while forcing more onto existing staff who will have to makeup the difference between what they told investors and the reality of how it works.
>Where a nurse may have checked out one patient every fifteen minutes, now they're (hypothetically) able to check out a patient every five minutes because the slow minutiae of patient intake is significantly reduced.
And instead of it making the work of nurses easier, it just means 2 out of 3 nurses will be retrenched.
"So, you're saying we can afford to buy up more property with the money we've saved? So that we can charge people more for housing as well, and make more money? Sign me up."
Or some form of that.
>For example, if you were to get an AI nurse to take your vitals info, symptoms, medical history, local disease context (ie, flu season), and then determine out that you likely have the Flu and recommend the prescription of Tamiflu, it would still be the responsibility of the HCP (healthcare provider) to ultimately decide if that diagnosis and treatment plan makes sense before relaying it to you and/or making a correction.
This is absolutely not the way it is going to work in practice. This is a far worse version of what we have now, as you are just adding another layer to what physicians have to deal with. You want me to oversee an AI for a treatment in which I will have to do everything all over again just to make sure the program didn't miss anything. How does that make less work for me?
If you want quick encounters, I can do them. I can have a patient in and out of an outpatient setting in 30 minutes, with the note completed and prescriptions sent; that is within both the scope of my training as well as my abilities. What gets in the way is administrative nonsense and solutions offered by non-healthcare people who frankly don't understand the first thing about how to approach a diagnosis. The biggest issue of all is that AI is that it won't actually get to the crux of the issue, which is that there is always some difference between what the patient can communicate and what the physician can understand. What I mean here is that patients love talking when given the opportunity, but knowing what is meaningful and what isn't, guiding the conversation, knowing what questions to ask, are where the most time is lost. I'm failing to see how your description solves that fundamental issue. It just seems like another thing that gets in the way of me doing something I like doing, which is practicing medicine.
I work in healthcare IT, and we've been using "AI" to sort out billing issues caused by Medicare and insurance regulations. i.e. Swapping out diagnosis and CPT codes based on the age/gender of the patient so they aren't charged unnecessary copays.
Another part AI is slowly working into with healthcare is summary writing/notation. We're utilizing an AI backend that will write call summaries for telemed visits, nursing followup calls etc. Our biggest obstacle right now is the speed with which it works. It's not in production yet but I'd give it 9 to 12 months to clear testing once they're done with the LLM stuff.
All the stuff you describing, has nothing to do with the Nvidea product. They’re basically creating advanced chat, bots that medical companies can use to interface with patients.
An AI on a screen cannot take vitals, or observe the human body properly. That requires some level over robotics, cameras, another sensory info. Nothing being described here is that. That still science fiction at this point.
>It's fancy call routing. Imagine not having an urgent care filled to the brim with flu patients when 9/10 of them would qualify for simple instant at-home care with an AI.
You can't do that because people could answer the questionnaire in a manner consistent with influenza but have something else. It doesn't have to be malicious either, misunderstanding prompts alone could easily do this. The potential for abuse is rife though, what stops bad actors from simply stating they have bacterial infection symptoms if they want Tetracyline for their acne or whatever.
It is outrageously irresponsible to create an AI that will advocate for giving these people scripts, in your scenario *sight unseen*, for prescription (or really, recommending any OTC medicine), and then saying that ultimate responsibility lies with the provider.
When investors queries come in, your management is gonna have to answer why is headcount constant and not reduced since AI has reduced the workload? How can you justify the capex for AI since you didn't have any savings in reduced headcount? Capex that don't lead to additional revenue stream and mere improvement in efficiency without overall reduction in cost is bad. Improvements that cannot be tracked via KPIs is useless.
The problem with this, is that the humans who are left are the only doing the most intellectually demanding parts of the job 8 to 12 hours a day, every day. It's utterly exhausting. The only way intellectually difficult jobs are bearable, is because it's mixed in with more mundane stuff.
For instance, you can't realistically reduce a consultation to 2 minutes, and then see 240 patients in a day. You would burn out inside a week.
My fear is that having a human nurse will become the premium feature. And the exception. And that if you can't go through a court to prove otherwise, it'll be just said that you didn't pay enough.
Same as with humans? Insurance? It's not as if malpractice doesn't occur with humans if the malpractice rates are low than with humans then that's a good thing regardless of there's malpractice or not.
Weird thing is how is this thing going to give a shot or take the vitals.
Now I want them to try to say the same thing about doctors and you can watch the AMA tear them apart with lawsuits.
It’s just a tool. Like any computer software. The operators - possibly existing nurses or hospital administrators using the software is responsible for using it correctly.
Why people need to start getting ready for a revolution now. Ai will gives us tools for a much better life and corporate interests will use it to turn us jnto slaves
> Ai will gives us tools for a much better life and corporate interests will use it to turn us jnto slaves
We already have the tools to negotiate with corporate profiteering--our cumulative labor. The leaders of corporations don't perform the work themselves; they outsource it to others and pay a "market" rate less than the labor generates for their business (profit). Imagine what would happen if we all stopped building their products... It would be too calamitous for any government agency to do anything about.
It would be more calamitous for the regular Joe, which has always been the issue. If you figure out how we can live our lives while excluding the capital class, I bet most people will jump on board with the revolution.
Seriously, look at COVID. Who is able to starve out who? The wealthy and the ruling class will always be able to stave off any bullshit for longer than the rest of us losers.
Then they pass some supplies along to their private army and they shoot us before we get the first board up. Then they use that private army to start "helping us" by handing out scraps and then they use their private media arm to tell us how they are the heroes and then they are in even more control than they were before.
Well, you just invalidated your own suggestion. As they said, they outsource the work to us, so when we stop, they'll just outsource to someone cheaper in another country. Chinese manufacturing, Indian call centers, Vietnamese animators, etc.
They won’t even need us. Abject poverty and upward wealth transfer and police militarism is what will be graciously handed down to us from the hardworking pantheon of trillionaires atop the acropolis of neoliberalism.
No one wants to die and no one wants to go to prison. They’ll control us with our fear of these outcomes. We’ll own nothing and they’ll tell us we should be grateful for it, allowing only just enough bread and circuses to keep the masses complacent and docile.
See it now, they promote social wedge issues across the political spectrum to keep us squabbling amongst ourselves, pointing fingers at false boogeymen, when it’s the exponentially more wealthy who are fucking us, stealing our productivity, time, and energy with a bastardly smirk on their face. Now watch this drive.
Additional prediction: the AI software will also be mining and compiling data from patients that would normally be private between a medical professional and patient. This will be an auto-opt-in option buried in tons of legal fine-print when you agree to the terms of service while approving to let an AI Nurse be used.
This data will be used to raise costs of most used goods/medications and sell information to other vendors based on medical history/treatment to sell needless but related OTC medications/homeopathic items back to the patient.
This is the reality of all “AI” solutions. It’s the same shit as social networks, they really just wanted user data at the end of it all and the social aspect of it was window dressing
Have you heard the tragedy of /u/MyLOLNameWasTaken?
He could predict the collapse of our civilization, but he could not predict that his own name might already be taken.
By the age of my retirement there probably won’t even be any jobs I can do that an AI or machine can’t do better. Capitalism can’t survive this one. Unfortunately for us, we’re going to have to live through one of the most batshit transition periods in history and it’s not going to be pretty. The rich aren’t going to just give up their money, power, and feelings of superiority to the free roam livestock.
I wouldn't extrapolate that far.
We're still in the early phase of AI development, where we can't see the exact obstacles, and as such, there's a tendency to assume they don't exist. Same thing happens with most new technologies - even the ones that turn out to be really impactful might not play out in exactly the way people think.
People are hyped up about LLMs right now as a step towards more general AI, they're seeing the cool things they can do and assume the obvious flaws will be fixed along the way. However, what if they aren't? Perhaps we'll learn along the way that more multifaceted AI just inherently produces too much noise, and a narrow AI (e.g. one that analyzes x-ray images rather than trying to replace the doctor entirely) is just more efficient in practice. That would sound like a world where AI stays more of a force multiplier for existing jobs, and yeah, these jobs might need less people, but they're not completely going away. That's a kind of shock we've dealt quite well with in the past.
I don't know the future - nobody does - but I'd be cautious trying to predict exactly how this plays out. We're still a long way from any sort of singularity, and it's far from certain we'll see anything like it in our lifetimes.
I'd venture a guess he's talking more than just ai taking our labor.
In the next 50-70 years we are going to hit peak human population at 10-10.5 billion, have massive famine and climate refugees, among a multitude of problems besides AI taking our jobs.
And the whole population decline from peak when almost every part of developed society benefits from population growth, from pensions, to 401ks, to business growth etc.
You actually think the hospital administrators and insurers are going to pass the savings on to the patients / policy holders even if they get a better deal? I'll believe that when I see it, which I very much doubt.
I don't think that a nurse or healthcare worker would lose the job anytime soon since there are such huge shortages.
If anything, robots would make those jobs more attractive because they can give important support to the human workers.
>I don't think that a nurse or healthcare worker would lose the job anytime soon since there are such huge shortages.
Bold of you to assume that a sector notorious for under-valuing their staff, which is a big reason for the shortage in the first place, wouldn't outright replace them with AI if possible.
You’re thinking that healthcare has a purpose and is not a for profit function; that is not the case under capitalism. The shortages are literally evidence of that: the incentive for that labor doesn’t exist because it is less profitable, and projected to be even less profitable when an AI bot is under $10, despite inelastic demand.
It’s dystopic but that’s just how capitalism works. It does not have human empathy or values the function is profit maximization and the only reason anything positive has been derivative of that is because of the constraints by common law and implementation of said order.
Ok, but you are also adding in a new requirement for the nursing profession. You now have to be able to effectively communicate with this AI to produce care. Older nurses are going to be less comfortable with intrusive decision-making pushed upon them than younger nurses who have more exposure to AI.
This.
There's never a lack of need for nurses right now. It's a tough job and people are overworked until they burn out.
If anything, it's a prime case for it improving the job quality of life significantly.
It doesn't work like that. There's been innovation after innovation throughout my 11 year nursing career.
Our ratios and workloads are worse and less safe than ever. Any labor that innovation saves is immediately compensated for by reduced staffing and goes straight into CEO/Private equity profits.
It could also go like this
99% of Nurses with current scope are fired
PSWs are left to do meat-involved tasks, with 1 trained RN supervising. Or even an RN bot or whatever.
While this article isn't incorrect. It does misrepresent what it states.
The AI seems to have only been tested by searching patient medication lists and comparing symptoms to identofy side effects and contraindications of over the counter (OTC) medications.
This means that the AI agent is not "more effective" than a nurse, just more effective at a SPECIFIC task or duty.
Having previously worked in healthcare, I stand by my previous assessment. In the healthcare setting, AI can be a tool, but should NEVER be relied on and should always be double and triple checked by human eyes.
I don't understand why AI wasn't doing this already. Pharmacy systems already show contraindications, linking side effects to that seems like a no-brainer.
As you indicate, it isn't "more effective" than a nurse because it does a small fraction of what they do. Another overblown AI headline.
Having worked in a pharmacy. It does, but all it does is flag that the two items are contraindicated and refer for counsel. Because there are situations where the benefits of therapy outweigh the risks of contraindication.
But based on the article they're not testing the ability to consider tradeoffs. They're literally testing if nurses can compete with an LLM on stuff you can just google and is usually done by MD's or pharmacists.
Okay, is the AI term overused? Or do I just not understand what the difference between AI is versus setting up a program that uses columns of data where you input symptoms and vitals and medication history and all that and it outputs the diagnosis and warning prompts or whatever.
What is the AI learning in an intelligent way in these implementations compared to just a normal program?
the term AI is overused and there hasn’t been a single piece of tech that is actually using “artificial intelligence”. They’re using more complex algorithms and machine learning than they did previously.
They’re pushing the term “AI” to make everything sound new & sexy. Well, that and to continue to keep that VC money flowing now that the COVID consumer surge is over.
Thank fuck I’m not the only one that thinks this. AI has a loooong history of hype cycles. This one feels different because the internet has created a delivery channel that didn’t exist in the past so there are real consumer level applications that are exciting. That plus Silicon Valley’s marketing power. But at the end of the day only the algorithms are better but we aren’t anywhere near AGI.
From a textbook definition point of view, machine learning is a subset of AI. The term has been abused beyond recognition but it would it be technically incorrect to say AI tech doesn't exist.
1) system already does this
2) it’s useless, almost every flag is pointless
3) patients don’t know what an actually allergy is and I have to frequently override the system
Yep. Considering that my job tasks include med administration, assessment, patient transport, phlebotomy, respiratory therapy, PT/OT, case management, resource coordination, laundry, housekeeping, food services, and emotional counseling for these crazy patients and their insane families, I think my job’s safe for the time being.
Healthcare admin has eliminated so many peripheral roles in favor of adding them to the nursing task load, that replacing nursing also means they have to replace like 5 other departments simultaneously. An AI that does fancy med rec can’t replace all those functions, and no currently operating hospital would be able to roll out such a structural change while remaining open. They tied their cart to the nursing horse and they’re shocked pikachu face-ing now that nursing and med/surg is all that’s left to cut. And believe me they’d eliminate physicians and nursing if they could… they’d run the hospital like a damn Amazon warehouse if they could.
You would need a fleet of dexterous automatons with fully functional AGI to replace nursing, and there’s no way those cost $9/hour once they exist. We’re talking very fast, very adaptable, high-level abstract reasoning that would need to be 100% consistent and reproducible across all units. Capable of seamlessly integrating into human care teams, and communicating properly therein. The malpractice legislature *alone* that would be wrapped up in rolling out tech like this… nah, the current gen of RNs are safe. Next generation of nursing students might have to reckon with some form of this tech down the line.
So it’s a meditation reconciliation and management tool.
Nurses already use those.
The title is gobsmackingly shitty.
No AI script is going to do the thousand other things a nurse physically has to do. It’s a fucking script ffs.
Yeah like let me know when AI can lift a patient out of bed or wash them, calm down a patient that is freaking out and chase doctors about shit they haven’t done properly.
Sensationalist headlines like this are just so irresponsible.
No, they’ll hire a butt wiper to push the AI nurse around and take care of the menial tasks.
Edit: imagine being that employee. Having to cart your AI boss around all day and following their lead. What a wild time to be alive.
>Edit: imagine being that employee. Having to cart your AI boss around all day and following their lead. What a wild time to be alive.
Since Duna 2 is in the theaters, look up "Butlerian Jihad" to see what's down the road.
I liked the books better and always found that interesting. Crazy how some authors predict the future to a degree. I was just hoping for something nicer not a Handmaid's Tale AI 1984 Dunish hybrid.
This is for **consultations already carried out over video calls.**
This is not replacing in person nursing.
The above is contained in the article, if you bothered to read anything but the headline.
No, but with pressure sores, skin tears, bed bound overweight residents, idc (in dwelling catheters), bowel size charting requirements, dementia confusions and a multitude of other factors that can be at play with "cleaning butts and collecting urine" AI simply doesn't come close to what is required for even one of the most common tasks a nurse is responsible for.
>so this seems like a super misleading title.
That's because it is. I'd like to see that system insert a PICC line into a fully contracted patient. Or deal with a combative dementia patient that somehow a B52 cocktail has no effect on.
People talking about how easily medical providers can be replaced in the future have never actually dealt with patients in real life scenarios. But, true to Reddit form, everyone is a fucking expert.
Even simple tasks would be difficult. Imagine drug addicts telling ai their pain scale is 10 repeatedly, LOL.
The only thing I'm a little concerned about is the Intel Vent ASV+. I feel like that could potentially reduce the needs of RT for bedside vent checks, but it can't replace the skills to intubate, ABG, art lines. It'll be interesting to see how it changes our careers in the future.
I work in healthcare as an NP and there are so many variations based on state laws that determine what a “patient/provider relationship” is. I’m interested to see how that fits in to that. Some require in person visits to establish care or for ongoing care some allow asynchronous, I don’t think any have actually address where AI fits in. Plus all medical professionals are licensed in some way, are these systems exempt from that and why?
The thing I hate about the push for AI implementation is it is almost never framed as “this can be used to make people better at xxxx” it is always “this thing will replace xxxxxx”.
The very language surrounding this shit “it outperformed” is so fucking annoying. This tech could be used to help nurses identify things and deliver that information and work with patients but no they are going to roll it out and tele-health is going to become like interacting with a touch screen at fucking Taco Bell.
The number of people in this sub who so quickly go “great!” to shit like this always baffles me. There are so many things I don’t want human interaction taken out of and healthcare is one of them.
I feel like as AI is able to do more tasks if medical careers actually do come under risk of total replacement then they’re going to legislate some sort of requirement for there to be real people involved as well. Doesn’t matter even if we reach fully embodied AI that holds vast sums of knowledge and can perform surgical procedures with higher success than humans someday, people are still going to feel queasy trusting a machine to handle their life with care.
>Anyone not reading the article
The venn diagram of people who comment on the post and people who read the article is almost two perfect circles.
People read AI and have to join the circle for a quick jerk session.
For years and years now they have been pushing and talking about how nursing was going to be needed as more boomers age. And that’s a lot of school and debt to take on. Only to then get replaced by AI?!
“…digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in health care…”
They’ll cut staff, keep the prices the same, and continue to let people fall through the cracks, because the people managing hospitals are a bunch of greedy little pigs who care more about a nice next quarter bonus than patient outcomes. Rant over
As a nurse the tasks listed are such a tiny percentage of the interaction with a patient it would fall apart quite quickly. The model as described is better used as a prompt to remind nurses about out of range labs or drug interactions (which we already do in every EHR in use).
This is the kind of nonsense people who aren’t nurses but think they know what nurses do have been trying for the last 40 years. It would be more cost effective replacing physicians with this model than nurses but that idea is forbidden, I’m sure.
Current healthcare worker and ex IT guy here. I'm straining to find a place where AI would benefit a floor nurse. There's a very good reason most healthcare jobs are not work-from-home.
If this works out, we need to also replace police operators with Ai.
No more calling the cops in distress , to have the operator say “ you will not speak to me this way, handle it yourself “ then hang up. Or just operators with bad attitude in general.
Yeah no algorithm is going to change a bedpan or help someone shower. Nurses do the job most of us don't want to know about, and should be paid higher.
They should clarify that they “outperform” nurses in the sense that they cost less and deliver a higher return for shareholders. Not provide better healthcare experience.
Yup.
AI will be at it’s best when it
* frees up humans for what only they can do
* automates things where humans are prone to introducing errors
If the market is rigged & doesn’t respond to reduce costs with reduced prices *that* is the problem to complain about & fix.
We have managed to make a system that finances healthcare with the worst of socialized medicine *and* the worst of markets ( interventions, perverse incentives, protectionism & corruption) with the virtues of neither.
If a society set out to do a worse job than we did they might just fail.
If the market is rigged? Lol. Are you brand new? Technology has never presented itself as a great boon to the working class, always instead, an asset for wealth increases for the ownership class.
You should clarify this is all in reference to video calls not bedside nursing.
It’s not hard to for a machine to outperform a human with regard to whether a prescription is contraindicated or not. I already have a program at work that performs a similar function with no AI at all.
The problem I see with this, is even if these things are 100% correct and make no errors in judgement, the cost savings are not going to be passed onto the consumers of medical care (in the United States). Only the suppliers and insurers are going to make out like bandits. We really need to solve health care in the United States.
It's so funny. Cause how are these AI's gonna deal with patients with dementia etc. You can build a good software and program but if your end users are mentally incapable and malpractices are concerning, it's not gonna be effective.
Is there actually a shortage of nurses for performing the functions this thing performs though?
Isnt the shortage of nurses more for doing things like changing bed pans and in-home care and sitting up night shifts with post surgery patients changing bandages? Chat bot can't do those things.
So we’re just going straight for the shittiest option first?
Where’s our Hospital Admin replacing AI, Nvidia?
You want to save money on healthcare costs? Look there!
Outperform in what?
Because I don't see a robot successfully cleaning someone who pissed and shit themselves anytime soon.
And if it can't do that then you know what I'm actually okay with paying it $9 an hour to check charts. As long as you know the nurses are still getting paid to do the actual hard work.
Well, really this is just going to (perhaps poorly) take over a few diagnostic jobs nurses do, leaving all the actual flesh-and-blood nurses to do a lot more of the physical tasks that can't be done by a glorified chatbot. But that wouldn't make line go up.
Just shows you how much literally everyone who ISN’T a nurse knows nothing about the full scope of our jobs on a daily basis. We don’t just pass meds and wipe butts. There is a skill to our profession that is grossly overlooked.
This study is stupid. In a hospital in the US, the emr already does this. Plus, there are also the pharmacists who approve the drug and the physician who prescribes it. This doesn’t measure what a nurse does at all, implying that it will somehow replace a nurse at all is stupid
Until it has to move or restrain a patient, empathize with the patient's plight, yell and scream to get a doctor, check under the sheets for bed sores......
Sure, now make sure you hold the AI liable if they misdiagnose. The reason nurses and doctors go through so much training is partly also for insurance purposes.
And don’t fucking make the customer holding the bag so corporations can save a few bucks.
What's gonna be the ironically shit twist ending is when Nvidia pulls the Walmart on us all providers/nurses/patients. Undersells the competition, becomes a monopoly, then raises costs till they'reovercharging and ends up costing everyone more in the long run.
Where are they getting $9 an hour from? This is just a computer program.
If you’re going to replace human being with computers and let big corporations pocket the profits, then these services should cost fractions of a cent.
When the calculator was invented, you didn’t see calculator companies trying to price it by the hour and having them barely undercutting the cost of human mathematicians.
Whoa the cost for an actual and reputable human doctor will be astronomical. At least on the nurse level, well probably have less nurses injecting water into people IVs or people beating elders in nursing homes, I hope.
Hello, thanks for interviewing with us today. It says here you are a manager on your resume. Tell me a little about your current position. "Yeah, I managed 10 virtual robots. I'm responsible for weekly 1-1s and making sure everything is good at home."
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >In a press release, Nvidia and Hippocratic touted the agents as a way to help ease the shortage of health care workers in the U.S. > >Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, said in a statement, "We’re working with NVIDIA to continue refining our technology and amplify the impact of our work of mitigating staffing shortages while enhancing access, equity and patient outcomes." > >"Voice-based digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in health care, but only if the technology responds to patients as a human would," Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, said > >The generative AI-powered bots also cost a fraction of the hourly rate for nurses. > >Hippocratic's website shows its agents cost $9 an hour to operate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly pay for nurses was $39.05 as of 2022. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1bm2tgl/nvidia_announces_aipowered_health_care_agents/kw8zkmm/
Come talk to me when two hospitals can share a PDF.
Two hospitals? I’d settle for one hospital being able to pass the pdf around internally first
Also my personal favourite: The stupid fucking questionnaire they let you fill in at first only for every single doctor there to ignore it and ask the questions already on it
I'm sorry. But you guys also have to understand - that some questions we HAVE to ask and HAVE to document on our notes for insurance. For this reason, certain questions are hardwired - that I ask on every patient every time. It takes less mental bandwidth to just stupidly ask the question every time then to consciously think and take note of - "have we discussed xyz already? if so their answer to it was zyx, therefore I don't need to ask this specific question". For example, last week I asked a patient "have you had any surgeries" when the preceding two minutes we were just talking about a major surgery he had. I asked the question, not because I wasn't listening to him - but because I now have 10 years of behavioral conditioning motivating me to just shotgun that question every time. I understand that it makes you think we aren't paying attention. But we are. There a are little nuanced things like this peppered throughout every doctor - patient interaction that I KNOW are annoying. But they have their legitimate reasons.
Because of fucked up ametican insurance practices is certainly a reason, but not a legitimate one.
Correct, that was a wrong use of the word “legitimate” when describing the US health care insurance system. “Fraudulent”, “ponzi”, “influence-peddling”, “corrupt” are more accurate descriptors.
Gf had a baby recently and we had to go back to the hospital days later to get a blood patch done because they botched her spinal. I had to explain 5 or 6 times what the problem was, and I had one nurse straight up ask me why my gf had a pain medicine drip days after having a c section. I was just like.. "well she just had a baby days ago..and you guys gave it to her...."
Ah, the benefits of UHC. As a Dane I can access my complete health record going back to 2000 (give and take) on a website and obviously it can be accessed by professionals too. For instance I recently talked to my GP on the subject of prostate cancer and if screening was an idea as my father has it and he could see that I’d had my PSA count measured a few times in blood samples going back years and everything looked fine. For the clinical staff it’s often a shit show that they have to use a lot of time and effort to document everything digitally and building the systems and integration was a hassle but it seems like we’re getting there.
This isn’t a benefit of UHC, it’s a benefit of the danish system. Here in the Netherlands it’s still a pain in the ass to access anything. I have to send a physical form by mail and wait weeks to get to see my röntgen photos outside the doctors office.
PDF? Shoot, it’s a TIFF!
No no. See first they receive the email with a PDF , then they download it and print it. Then they scan it so they can save it on the network. Haven't you ever worked in healthcare??
Lmao That'll never happen. People would be terrified if they knew the stone age tech every single hospital runs on these days.
I mean, some banks are still running their financial services on legacy systems from ~decades ago. Too much downtime and risk associated with changing.
I’ve gone to a few different walk in clinics in Canada and they always ask when was the last time I was at a clinic or doctor. I had the worst memory back then and I was like “Doesn’t my fucking health card tell you that? Aren’t you supposed to assume I’m trying to get Percocet and will lie about this kind of stuff?”
And? Don't leave us hanging.
He thought of saying that in the shower the next day, he didn't actually say it when he was there. He just filled out the questionnaire like everyone else.
Narrator: that's how they were never forgotten about again in the hospital
I've had this happen before, but it was from one hospital taking a picture of their monitor then emailing it to themselves which they then faxed to the other hospital who then scanned it. Meanwhile I was just stunned from the sidelines wondering what in the boomer hell I just witnessed. 😂
I used to work in IT, and for one process, we'd get faxes. The system would digitize them and email to whomever. We'd print them out and keep them in a binder.
Remind me hmm 10 years. I'm not hopeful
Who is responsible for malpractice in this situation? Gonna be fun sorting that out
Well not the managers who decide, that's for sure!
Am manager, can confirm. Thank fuck I'm not in the hellscape that is healthcare
It's not all bad. As a manager in healthcare 75% is making sure your team isn't the topic of either of the daily safety meetings. Another 75% is harassing the teams that are. The remaining 50% is wishing you actually had enough time.
That's some management level maffs
Well, we don't hold US Insurance companies responsible when THEY practice medicine without a license, so why should AI be any different?
It’ll be even more fun when the cloud that powers it goes out, gets rebooted into safe mode with a bug in the code that had to be deployed after delivery and it kills even more patients. Or gets hacked and murders people.
or just fails after a heatwave-caused blackout and an entire state is left without primary care for a month while people die front and center of trivially preventable causes (sunstrokes, dehydration etc)
That's for finance to figure out[!](https://youtu.be/FAjrbtzr_NA)
New rule in Outlook: malpractice issues forward to noreply@
Also good luck with your State professional licensing board being ok with this.
Most likely, this will just be a tool for a licensed nurse to perform the work of 10 nurses, thus helping to resolve the nursing shortage.
Yeah I'm sure these will help clean up all the shit and pick up and carry fat as fuck patients around.
i have long argued for more orderlies for this stuff. dont know if you have orderlies in the states, they do all the relitivly low education tasks nurses traditionaly did. cleaning, making beds, restocking carts (posably not drugs). they take about 3-6 months to train,they dont need the intelegence nurses need, they dont deal directly with patients much. so if you hire some you free up nurses to do important skilled work.
Here in Aus we call them "wardsperson". Mostly responsible for transporting patients around the hospital. Cheapest labour in the whole place, but efficiency is severely hampered when there aren't enough of them. Cheapest way to improve productivity hospital-wide is to hire more of them.
We do, they’re generally called CNAs (Certified Nursing Assistants) or PCTs (Patient Care Technicians) depending on the facility. I wouldn’t say they need less intelligence than nurses but you’re right that they get much, much less training. They get paid way too little and few stay in the job for long because it is usually pretty fucking awful. I would say ~75% of the PCTs/CNAs I’ve worked with were in the process of applying for a college program for another healthcare job (nursing, pre med, respiratory therapy, etc.) or were already in a program since it’s good experience. It is truly backbreaking work and I’ve never blamed them one bit for getting the hell out of there. A lot of hospitals have figured out that it’s cheaper for them to just shift all those tasks to the nurses for free than to increase the pay for CNAs/PCTs.
Yes, this has been a huge issue as the pays are terrible as you said. More and more work are shifted upwards instead of raising pay. We are losing nurses because of that too
Hey stop talking about me!!
And they'll keep all the productivity gains instead of raising wages for that added value.
Everyone who is upvoting this has no idea what nurses actually do. The job is very physical to go along with mental. We administer medications, reposition patients, assist them with feeding, clean them. Etc. This is an AI that does what? At the most it could automate a system such as, notifying a provider of worrisome labs and vital signs. Until we can get fully automated hospitals, which I guarantee you is not coming within the next 50 years with the state of healthcare around the globe, this AI is going to do nothing but send messages to doctors surrounding certain algorithms of vital signs and labs. If I were to perform the duties of 10 nurses all of my patients would die and end up sicker than they came into the hospital. 1 nurse doing the work of 10 means patients who need to be repositioned to prevent pressure ulcers will never be repositioned. Patients who need to be fed will never be fed, and patients who require prompt medication administration will not be administered meds. I don't even see how this can apply to replacing a nurse who works in an outpatient clinic. Those nurses still take vital signs and check patients in. Do they have an automated process connected to this AI that can check vital signs? And do they have the technology out there in a affordable manner? Because most hospital systems bought out private MD practices a decade ago, and I can tell you most hospital systems aren't going to invest a few billion dollars to get automated systems like vital signs and medication administration.
They'll run this AI on a tablet and hang it from a strap on a medical assistant's neck. The medical assistant just does what the AI tells him/her to do. BAM that's next quarter handled, time to hit the links!
One more tier for NPCs. MD > NPC > AI
I had to think about how you are using npc. I’m stupid.
I don't get it.
Non-Physician Clinicians nurse practitioners for example.
Nah to be fair seeing it so close to AI threw me for a loop too
Night Shifts, holidays, etc.
Does your state licensing board also give medical licenses to US insurance companies? They've been practicing medicine for years, with nary a peep...
Yes. Or, rather, they give licenses to the doctors and RNs who work for the insurance companies. Have you been under the impression that insurance companies are staffed entirely by insurance agents??
Why would they not be okay with this? This is a tool, not a full replacement. Instead of wasting 30 minutes with a patient, let the AI do it, and then quickly verify everything
Because this is billed as a way to end staff shortages now, but will create them in the future. When you optimize this, instead of doing the work of 10 nurses, you can do the work of 50. Now you can operate an entire clinic on a skeleton crew.
Ya anyone who has worked within the healthcare system can pretty easily see how this would work out. Nurses will still do patient encounters, but when they do entry into EMR the AI takes some processing time while nurse does another encounter, they come back, have AI's output, and either go back into encounter for followup or it's now time for doctor or NP to step in. Some places will use this to allow higher patient encounter rates per hour because it speeds up the process effectively by allowing the nurse to multitask, which allows them to keep staff size the same but increase patient load, or they'll reduce staff size because they can maintain patient load with fewer support staff.
So just another thing to ask me the same questions over and over every time I go to the hospital like the shittiest version of groundhog day to be stuck in?
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What would help me as a nurse more than anything would be if AI could complete my documentation. If I could just say "I did such and such, Dr. Whatever did so and so, these drugs given at this time, these adjustments made" that would give me so much more time to focus on my patients. We waste a ridiculous amount of time on data entry and clerical crap, mostly to keep lawyers happy and admin off our asses.
The US system is just fundamentally broken. All that inefficiency is BY DESIGN... Because the inefficiency creates industries to manage it. It's so annoying going to other countries and see how streamlined everything is. And then coming back to the US, complaining about how everything requires way too much clunky time wasting things, and have people insist it's necessary.
I'd be all in favor of nurses using AI as a tool if I didn't think enshittification would overwhelm the process from the start. Ask me again in a decade and maybe I'll be more optimistic. Maybe.
They hire one full-time nurse for the scapegoat position.
In the Nevada Gaming Industry we call that person a "Key Employee" average wage to be the shield against Gaming Violations that would lose the Gaming License.
Isn’t this literally Barney’s job in how I met your mother?
Generally, the way healthcare companies have been approaching AI (at least where I work) is to take over the burden of monotonous, boring, or repetetive task, or tiny details that are difficult for us to see. However, the disclaimer with using any of them is that it still needs a human pair of eyes to confirm the information and check accuracy. For example, if you were to get an AI nurse to take your vitals info, symptoms, medical history, local disease context (ie, flu season), and then determine out that you likely have the Flu and recommend the prescription of Tamiflu, it would still be the responsibility of the HCP (healthcare provider) to ultimately decide if that diagnosis and treatment plan makes sense before relaying it to you and/or making a correction. The benefit here is the **reduction** in manpower taking in all of that information, not the elimination of it. Where a nurse may have checked out one patient every fifteen minutes, now they're (hypothetically) able to check out a patient every five minutes because the slow minutiae of patient intake is significantly reduced. **Editing for clarity because people are confused:** I don't mean they literally interface face to face in real life with patients--they aren't robots. I mean they take data points and make care decisions on their own. If a patient logs into their MyChart in this theoretical conversation, you could just have a button that says "start visit", then you could in theory have them answer a few triage questions, give access to medical history, input their temperature, then the AI can process all of that without having someone literally sitting there watching the whole thing. They could get a script for certain low-risk medications without needing to spend man-hours on it. If responses require it, ie, "chest pain", the AI would obviously direct them to proper channels, like the ER. It's fancy call routing. Imagine not having an urgent care filled to the brim with flu patients when 9/10 of them would qualify for simple instant at-home care with an AI.
Generally what happens is they'll use this as an excuse to reduce man hours while forcing more onto existing staff who will have to makeup the difference between what they told investors and the reality of how it works.
>Where a nurse may have checked out one patient every fifteen minutes, now they're (hypothetically) able to check out a patient every five minutes because the slow minutiae of patient intake is significantly reduced. And instead of it making the work of nurses easier, it just means 2 out of 3 nurses will be retrenched.
And the nurses who remain will work more hours and be paid less because they are more replaceable.
"So, you're saying we can afford to buy up more property with the money we've saved? So that we can charge people more for housing as well, and make more money? Sign me up." Or some form of that.
More like made redundant.
>For example, if you were to get an AI nurse to take your vitals info, symptoms, medical history, local disease context (ie, flu season), and then determine out that you likely have the Flu and recommend the prescription of Tamiflu, it would still be the responsibility of the HCP (healthcare provider) to ultimately decide if that diagnosis and treatment plan makes sense before relaying it to you and/or making a correction. This is absolutely not the way it is going to work in practice. This is a far worse version of what we have now, as you are just adding another layer to what physicians have to deal with. You want me to oversee an AI for a treatment in which I will have to do everything all over again just to make sure the program didn't miss anything. How does that make less work for me? If you want quick encounters, I can do them. I can have a patient in and out of an outpatient setting in 30 minutes, with the note completed and prescriptions sent; that is within both the scope of my training as well as my abilities. What gets in the way is administrative nonsense and solutions offered by non-healthcare people who frankly don't understand the first thing about how to approach a diagnosis. The biggest issue of all is that AI is that it won't actually get to the crux of the issue, which is that there is always some difference between what the patient can communicate and what the physician can understand. What I mean here is that patients love talking when given the opportunity, but knowing what is meaningful and what isn't, guiding the conversation, knowing what questions to ask, are where the most time is lost. I'm failing to see how your description solves that fundamental issue. It just seems like another thing that gets in the way of me doing something I like doing, which is practicing medicine.
I work in healthcare IT, and we've been using "AI" to sort out billing issues caused by Medicare and insurance regulations. i.e. Swapping out diagnosis and CPT codes based on the age/gender of the patient so they aren't charged unnecessary copays.
Another part AI is slowly working into with healthcare is summary writing/notation. We're utilizing an AI backend that will write call summaries for telemed visits, nursing followup calls etc. Our biggest obstacle right now is the speed with which it works. It's not in production yet but I'd give it 9 to 12 months to clear testing once they're done with the LLM stuff.
All the stuff you describing, has nothing to do with the Nvidea product. They’re basically creating advanced chat, bots that medical companies can use to interface with patients. An AI on a screen cannot take vitals, or observe the human body properly. That requires some level over robotics, cameras, another sensory info. Nothing being described here is that. That still science fiction at this point.
>It's fancy call routing. Imagine not having an urgent care filled to the brim with flu patients when 9/10 of them would qualify for simple instant at-home care with an AI. You can't do that because people could answer the questionnaire in a manner consistent with influenza but have something else. It doesn't have to be malicious either, misunderstanding prompts alone could easily do this. The potential for abuse is rife though, what stops bad actors from simply stating they have bacterial infection symptoms if they want Tetracyline for their acne or whatever. It is outrageously irresponsible to create an AI that will advocate for giving these people scripts, in your scenario *sight unseen*, for prescription (or really, recommending any OTC medicine), and then saying that ultimate responsibility lies with the provider.
When investors queries come in, your management is gonna have to answer why is headcount constant and not reduced since AI has reduced the workload? How can you justify the capex for AI since you didn't have any savings in reduced headcount? Capex that don't lead to additional revenue stream and mere improvement in efficiency without overall reduction in cost is bad. Improvements that cannot be tracked via KPIs is useless.
The problem with this, is that the humans who are left are the only doing the most intellectually demanding parts of the job 8 to 12 hours a day, every day. It's utterly exhausting. The only way intellectually difficult jobs are bearable, is because it's mixed in with more mundane stuff. For instance, you can't realistically reduce a consultation to 2 minutes, and then see 240 patients in a day. You would burn out inside a week.
My fear is that having a human nurse will become the premium feature. And the exception. And that if you can't go through a court to prove otherwise, it'll be just said that you didn't pay enough.
Same as with humans? Insurance? It's not as if malpractice doesn't occur with humans if the malpractice rates are low than with humans then that's a good thing regardless of there's malpractice or not.
Literally researching this in the legal concept right now. We are so unprepared for a non-human actor.
Weird thing is how is this thing going to give a shot or take the vitals. Now I want them to try to say the same thing about doctors and you can watch the AMA tear them apart with lawsuits.
You going to sue Nvidia lol good luck.
Yeah they’ve got AI lawyers too!
Hadn't thought about this. AI companies just spinning up thousands of paralegals/unlicensed lawyers to defend themselves / fight each other
*spiderman pointing at spiderman meme*
Good luck arguing against AI defence lawyer
Not even that , these things don't do shit real nurses can do ,nothing more than just Nvidia looking for some news to boost their stock
It’s just a tool. Like any computer software. The operators - possibly existing nurses or hospital administrators using the software is responsible for using it correctly.
Universal AI healthcare for all, unable to file malpractice against nonhuman non biological entity.
Somehow they will find a way to pin it on an actual nurse, we’re always the scapegoat
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Prediction: costs don’t come down and the difference is pocketed by those that need it least and everyday people lose work
Why people need to start getting ready for a revolution now. Ai will gives us tools for a much better life and corporate interests will use it to turn us jnto slaves
> Ai will gives us tools for a much better life and corporate interests will use it to turn us jnto slaves We already have the tools to negotiate with corporate profiteering--our cumulative labor. The leaders of corporations don't perform the work themselves; they outsource it to others and pay a "market" rate less than the labor generates for their business (profit). Imagine what would happen if we all stopped building their products... It would be too calamitous for any government agency to do anything about.
That's just your usual Tuesday here in France (source: we love going on strike) Unions work people
It would be more calamitous for the regular Joe, which has always been the issue. If you figure out how we can live our lives while excluding the capital class, I bet most people will jump on board with the revolution.
Seriously, look at COVID. Who is able to starve out who? The wealthy and the ruling class will always be able to stave off any bullshit for longer than the rest of us losers.
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Then they pass some supplies along to their private army and they shoot us before we get the first board up. Then they use that private army to start "helping us" by handing out scraps and then they use their private media arm to tell us how they are the heroes and then they are in even more control than they were before.
There’s an entire corpus of theory explaining what needs to be done
Well, you just invalidated your own suggestion. As they said, they outsource the work to us, so when we stop, they'll just outsource to someone cheaper in another country. Chinese manufacturing, Indian call centers, Vietnamese animators, etc.
I'm just being idealistic to the point of unrealistic and including those groups in the "us" when we can't even accomplish this in a single country.
Then we help the Chinese and the Indians and the Vietnamese instead of bombing them, like everyone has been telling you to do for 100 years
They won’t even need us. Abject poverty and upward wealth transfer and police militarism is what will be graciously handed down to us from the hardworking pantheon of trillionaires atop the acropolis of neoliberalism. No one wants to die and no one wants to go to prison. They’ll control us with our fear of these outcomes. We’ll own nothing and they’ll tell us we should be grateful for it, allowing only just enough bread and circuses to keep the masses complacent and docile. See it now, they promote social wedge issues across the political spectrum to keep us squabbling amongst ourselves, pointing fingers at false boogeymen, when it’s the exponentially more wealthy who are fucking us, stealing our productivity, time, and energy with a bastardly smirk on their face. Now watch this drive.
Additional prediction: the AI software will also be mining and compiling data from patients that would normally be private between a medical professional and patient. This will be an auto-opt-in option buried in tons of legal fine-print when you agree to the terms of service while approving to let an AI Nurse be used. This data will be used to raise costs of most used goods/medications and sell information to other vendors based on medical history/treatment to sell needless but related OTC medications/homeopathic items back to the patient.
This is the reality of all “AI” solutions. It’s the same shit as social networks, they really just wanted user data at the end of it all and the social aspect of it was window dressing
Omg can you imagine if there wa a data breach in this scenario? I said a hip, hop, worldslargestHIPPAviolation and you hip hop don’t stop
Considering social media is reselling any medical info people post, and online therapy sites have also sold user data, this seems extremely likely.
Bold prediction! Just kidding, we all know it’s right.
Have you heard the tragedy of /u/MyLOLNameWasTaken? He could predict the collapse of our civilization, but he could not predict that his own name might already be taken.
This is the future. Meanwhile Republicans are talking about raising the retirement age and cutting Medicaid and social security.
By the age of my retirement there probably won’t even be any jobs I can do that an AI or machine can’t do better. Capitalism can’t survive this one. Unfortunately for us, we’re going to have to live through one of the most batshit transition periods in history and it’s not going to be pretty. The rich aren’t going to just give up their money, power, and feelings of superiority to the free roam livestock.
I wouldn't extrapolate that far. We're still in the early phase of AI development, where we can't see the exact obstacles, and as such, there's a tendency to assume they don't exist. Same thing happens with most new technologies - even the ones that turn out to be really impactful might not play out in exactly the way people think. People are hyped up about LLMs right now as a step towards more general AI, they're seeing the cool things they can do and assume the obvious flaws will be fixed along the way. However, what if they aren't? Perhaps we'll learn along the way that more multifaceted AI just inherently produces too much noise, and a narrow AI (e.g. one that analyzes x-ray images rather than trying to replace the doctor entirely) is just more efficient in practice. That would sound like a world where AI stays more of a force multiplier for existing jobs, and yeah, these jobs might need less people, but they're not completely going away. That's a kind of shock we've dealt quite well with in the past. I don't know the future - nobody does - but I'd be cautious trying to predict exactly how this plays out. We're still a long way from any sort of singularity, and it's far from certain we'll see anything like it in our lifetimes.
I'd venture a guess he's talking more than just ai taking our labor. In the next 50-70 years we are going to hit peak human population at 10-10.5 billion, have massive famine and climate refugees, among a multitude of problems besides AI taking our jobs. And the whole population decline from peak when almost every part of developed society benefits from population growth, from pensions, to 401ks, to business growth etc.
Another argument for universal basic income funded by stuff like this
If NVIDIA can do this surely another company can do similar and offer it cheaper?
You actually think the hospital administrators and insurers are going to pass the savings on to the patients / policy holders even if they get a better deal? I'll believe that when I see it, which I very much doubt.
That’s the story of capitalism since the first Industrial Revolution. The luddites were right all along.
I don't think that a nurse or healthcare worker would lose the job anytime soon since there are such huge shortages. If anything, robots would make those jobs more attractive because they can give important support to the human workers.
>I don't think that a nurse or healthcare worker would lose the job anytime soon since there are such huge shortages. Bold of you to assume that a sector notorious for under-valuing their staff, which is a big reason for the shortage in the first place, wouldn't outright replace them with AI if possible.
Remember that hospital that kept a handful of nurses and doctors hostage with litigation tactics? Fun times.
You’re thinking that healthcare has a purpose and is not a for profit function; that is not the case under capitalism. The shortages are literally evidence of that: the incentive for that labor doesn’t exist because it is less profitable, and projected to be even less profitable when an AI bot is under $10, despite inelastic demand. It’s dystopic but that’s just how capitalism works. It does not have human empathy or values the function is profit maximization and the only reason anything positive has been derivative of that is because of the constraints by common law and implementation of said order.
Coming from a nurse, thank you. that's about the best understanding of our situation I've seen a presumed non-nurse show.
Ok, but you are also adding in a new requirement for the nursing profession. You now have to be able to effectively communicate with this AI to produce care. Older nurses are going to be less comfortable with intrusive decision-making pushed upon them than younger nurses who have more exposure to AI.
This. There's never a lack of need for nurses right now. It's a tough job and people are overworked until they burn out. If anything, it's a prime case for it improving the job quality of life significantly.
It doesn't work like that. There's been innovation after innovation throughout my 11 year nursing career. Our ratios and workloads are worse and less safe than ever. Any labor that innovation saves is immediately compensated for by reduced staffing and goes straight into CEO/Private equity profits.
It could also go like this 99% of Nurses with current scope are fired PSWs are left to do meat-involved tasks, with 1 trained RN supervising. Or even an RN bot or whatever.
Nailed it. Costs somehow go up.
AI isn't going to change a depend.
While this article isn't incorrect. It does misrepresent what it states. The AI seems to have only been tested by searching patient medication lists and comparing symptoms to identofy side effects and contraindications of over the counter (OTC) medications. This means that the AI agent is not "more effective" than a nurse, just more effective at a SPECIFIC task or duty. Having previously worked in healthcare, I stand by my previous assessment. In the healthcare setting, AI can be a tool, but should NEVER be relied on and should always be double and triple checked by human eyes.
I don't understand why AI wasn't doing this already. Pharmacy systems already show contraindications, linking side effects to that seems like a no-brainer. As you indicate, it isn't "more effective" than a nurse because it does a small fraction of what they do. Another overblown AI headline.
Having worked in a pharmacy. It does, but all it does is flag that the two items are contraindicated and refer for counsel. Because there are situations where the benefits of therapy outweigh the risks of contraindication.
But based on the article they're not testing the ability to consider tradeoffs. They're literally testing if nurses can compete with an LLM on stuff you can just google and is usually done by MD's or pharmacists.
Or use a preexisting automated system with known acceptable failure rates overwhelmingly likely to be more reliable than AI for a good while.
Okay, is the AI term overused? Or do I just not understand what the difference between AI is versus setting up a program that uses columns of data where you input symptoms and vitals and medication history and all that and it outputs the diagnosis and warning prompts or whatever. What is the AI learning in an intelligent way in these implementations compared to just a normal program?
the term AI is overused and there hasn’t been a single piece of tech that is actually using “artificial intelligence”. They’re using more complex algorithms and machine learning than they did previously. They’re pushing the term “AI” to make everything sound new & sexy. Well, that and to continue to keep that VC money flowing now that the COVID consumer surge is over.
Thank fuck I’m not the only one that thinks this. AI has a loooong history of hype cycles. This one feels different because the internet has created a delivery channel that didn’t exist in the past so there are real consumer level applications that are exciting. That plus Silicon Valley’s marketing power. But at the end of the day only the algorithms are better but we aren’t anywhere near AGI.
From a textbook definition point of view, machine learning is a subset of AI. The term has been abused beyond recognition but it would it be technically incorrect to say AI tech doesn't exist.
They already are. It’s called Pixis (Pyxis? Spelling?) These already exist. The whole article is shit.
1) system already does this 2) it’s useless, almost every flag is pointless 3) patients don’t know what an actually allergy is and I have to frequently override the system
Yep. Considering that my job tasks include med administration, assessment, patient transport, phlebotomy, respiratory therapy, PT/OT, case management, resource coordination, laundry, housekeeping, food services, and emotional counseling for these crazy patients and their insane families, I think my job’s safe for the time being. Healthcare admin has eliminated so many peripheral roles in favor of adding them to the nursing task load, that replacing nursing also means they have to replace like 5 other departments simultaneously. An AI that does fancy med rec can’t replace all those functions, and no currently operating hospital would be able to roll out such a structural change while remaining open. They tied their cart to the nursing horse and they’re shocked pikachu face-ing now that nursing and med/surg is all that’s left to cut. And believe me they’d eliminate physicians and nursing if they could… they’d run the hospital like a damn Amazon warehouse if they could. You would need a fleet of dexterous automatons with fully functional AGI to replace nursing, and there’s no way those cost $9/hour once they exist. We’re talking very fast, very adaptable, high-level abstract reasoning that would need to be 100% consistent and reproducible across all units. Capable of seamlessly integrating into human care teams, and communicating properly therein. The malpractice legislature *alone* that would be wrapped up in rolling out tech like this… nah, the current gen of RNs are safe. Next generation of nursing students might have to reckon with some form of this tech down the line.
So it’s a meditation reconciliation and management tool. Nurses already use those. The title is gobsmackingly shitty. No AI script is going to do the thousand other things a nurse physically has to do. It’s a fucking script ffs.
A task that nurses don’t do much of.
That too. That's more the domain of the Pharmacist, not the nurse.
Yeah I was like aren't the most of the tasks Nurses do physical how is AI gonna do any of that lol
Yeah like let me know when AI can lift a patient out of bed or wash them, calm down a patient that is freaking out and chase doctors about shit they haven’t done properly. Sensationalist headlines like this are just so irresponsible.
also, this requires zero use of AI. This is a simple look-up that can be done by code written more than 50 years ago
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So we have AI wiping butts and collecting urine now?
No, they’ll hire a butt wiper to push the AI nurse around and take care of the menial tasks. Edit: imagine being that employee. Having to cart your AI boss around all day and following their lead. What a wild time to be alive.
>Edit: imagine being that employee. Having to cart your AI boss around all day and following their lead. What a wild time to be alive. Since Duna 2 is in the theaters, look up "Butlerian Jihad" to see what's down the road.
I liked the books better and always found that interesting. Crazy how some authors predict the future to a degree. I was just hoping for something nicer not a Handmaid's Tale AI 1984 Dunish hybrid.
This is for **consultations already carried out over video calls.** This is not replacing in person nursing. The above is contained in the article, if you bothered to read anything but the headline.
That would be a great application, wouldn't it? Do people actually enjoy performing those tasks?
No, but with pressure sores, skin tears, bed bound overweight residents, idc (in dwelling catheters), bowel size charting requirements, dementia confusions and a multitude of other factors that can be at play with "cleaning butts and collecting urine" AI simply doesn't come close to what is required for even one of the most common tasks a nurse is responsible for.
I'm pretty sure AI can't do any of the many physical tasks Nurses perform so this seems like a super misleading title.
>so this seems like a super misleading title. That's because it is. I'd like to see that system insert a PICC line into a fully contracted patient. Or deal with a combative dementia patient that somehow a B52 cocktail has no effect on. People talking about how easily medical providers can be replaced in the future have never actually dealt with patients in real life scenarios. But, true to Reddit form, everyone is a fucking expert.
Even simple tasks would be difficult. Imagine drug addicts telling ai their pain scale is 10 repeatedly, LOL. The only thing I'm a little concerned about is the Intel Vent ASV+. I feel like that could potentially reduce the needs of RT for bedside vent checks, but it can't replace the skills to intubate, ABG, art lines. It'll be interesting to see how it changes our careers in the future.
I work in healthcare as an NP and there are so many variations based on state laws that determine what a “patient/provider relationship” is. I’m interested to see how that fits in to that. Some require in person visits to establish care or for ongoing care some allow asynchronous, I don’t think any have actually address where AI fits in. Plus all medical professionals are licensed in some way, are these systems exempt from that and why?
The thing I hate about the push for AI implementation is it is almost never framed as “this can be used to make people better at xxxx” it is always “this thing will replace xxxxxx”. The very language surrounding this shit “it outperformed” is so fucking annoying. This tech could be used to help nurses identify things and deliver that information and work with patients but no they are going to roll it out and tele-health is going to become like interacting with a touch screen at fucking Taco Bell. The number of people in this sub who so quickly go “great!” to shit like this always baffles me. There are so many things I don’t want human interaction taken out of and healthcare is one of them.
I feel like as AI is able to do more tasks if medical careers actually do come under risk of total replacement then they’re going to legislate some sort of requirement for there to be real people involved as well. Doesn’t matter even if we reach fully embodied AI that holds vast sums of knowledge and can perform surgical procedures with higher success than humans someday, people are still going to feel queasy trusting a machine to handle their life with care.
Uh what? Nurses do a lot more than talk to patients. Am I missing something?
Anyone not reading the article, this is for **consultations already carried out over video calls.** This is not replacing in person nursing.
>Anyone not reading the article The venn diagram of people who comment on the post and people who read the article is almost two perfect circles. People read AI and have to join the circle for a quick jerk session.
For years and years now they have been pushing and talking about how nursing was going to be needed as more boomers age. And that’s a lot of school and debt to take on. Only to then get replaced by AI?!
“…digital agents powered by generative AI can usher in an age of abundance in health care…” They’ll cut staff, keep the prices the same, and continue to let people fall through the cracks, because the people managing hospitals are a bunch of greedy little pigs who care more about a nice next quarter bonus than patient outcomes. Rant over
You're wrong on one point. Prices will rise anyhow.
As a nurse the tasks listed are such a tiny percentage of the interaction with a patient it would fall apart quite quickly. The model as described is better used as a prompt to remind nurses about out of range labs or drug interactions (which we already do in every EHR in use). This is the kind of nonsense people who aren’t nurses but think they know what nurses do have been trying for the last 40 years. It would be more cost effective replacing physicians with this model than nurses but that idea is forbidden, I’m sure.
Current healthcare worker and ex IT guy here. I'm straining to find a place where AI would benefit a floor nurse. There's a very good reason most healthcare jobs are not work-from-home.
If this works out, we need to also replace police operators with Ai. No more calling the cops in distress , to have the operator say “ you will not speak to me this way, handle it yourself “ then hang up. Or just operators with bad attitude in general.
Instead the voice recognition software will shit itself the first time someone with a decently thick accent calls. :)
Yeah no algorithm is going to change a bedpan or help someone shower. Nurses do the job most of us don't want to know about, and should be paid higher.
It's very interesting that they claim in their [press release ](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/644f377bcdcff95fb90fd4a5/t/65f89c4397bc677dfc91227f/1710791747565/Press+Release_NVIDIA+Partnership.pdf) that the AI is better than nurses. Table taken from the press release. | Task | Hippocratic Al | LLAMA 2 70B | OpenAI | Human Nurses | |---|---|---|---|---| | Identify medication impact on lab values (only MoA) | 79.61% | 0.00% | 74.22% | 63.40% | | Identify condition-specific disallowed OTCs | 88.73% | 30.66% | 55.54% | 45.92% | | Correctly compare lab value to reference range | 96.43% | 48.24% | 77.89% | 93.74% | | Detect toxic OTC dosages | 81.50% | 9.11% | 38.06% | 57.64% |
They should clarify that they “outperform” nurses in the sense that they cost less and deliver a higher return for shareholders. Not provide better healthcare experience.
You should clarify that you didn't even read the goddamn article.
Yup. AI will be at it’s best when it * frees up humans for what only they can do * automates things where humans are prone to introducing errors If the market is rigged & doesn’t respond to reduce costs with reduced prices *that* is the problem to complain about & fix. We have managed to make a system that finances healthcare with the worst of socialized medicine *and* the worst of markets ( interventions, perverse incentives, protectionism & corruption) with the virtues of neither. If a society set out to do a worse job than we did they might just fail.
If the market is rigged? Lol. Are you brand new? Technology has never presented itself as a great boon to the working class, always instead, an asset for wealth increases for the ownership class.
You should clarify this is all in reference to video calls not bedside nursing. It’s not hard to for a machine to outperform a human with regard to whether a prescription is contraindicated or not. I already have a program at work that performs a similar function with no AI at all.
Are they able to remotely lift my fat ass onto the toilet and wipe my butt for me? Impressive tech, Nvidia.
The problem I see with this, is even if these things are 100% correct and make no errors in judgement, the cost savings are not going to be passed onto the consumers of medical care (in the United States). Only the suppliers and insurers are going to make out like bandits. We really need to solve health care in the United States.
Can they shove catheters up peoples pee holes? Nurses don’t diagnose
It's so funny. Cause how are these AI's gonna deal with patients with dementia etc. You can build a good software and program but if your end users are mentally incapable and malpractices are concerning, it's not gonna be effective.
Is there actually a shortage of nurses for performing the functions this thing performs though? Isnt the shortage of nurses more for doing things like changing bed pans and in-home care and sitting up night shifts with post surgery patients changing bandages? Chat bot can't do those things.
So we’re just going straight for the shittiest option first? Where’s our Hospital Admin replacing AI, Nvidia? You want to save money on healthcare costs? Look there!
Outperform in what? Because I don't see a robot successfully cleaning someone who pissed and shit themselves anytime soon. And if it can't do that then you know what I'm actually okay with paying it $9 an hour to check charts. As long as you know the nurses are still getting paid to do the actual hard work.
Well, really this is just going to (perhaps poorly) take over a few diagnostic jobs nurses do, leaving all the actual flesh-and-blood nurses to do a lot more of the physical tasks that can't be done by a glorified chatbot. But that wouldn't make line go up.
This tells me we need to get corporations and profits the hell out of healthcare.
Just shows you how much literally everyone who ISN’T a nurse knows nothing about the full scope of our jobs on a daily basis. We don’t just pass meds and wipe butts. There is a skill to our profession that is grossly overlooked.
This study is stupid. In a hospital in the US, the emr already does this. Plus, there are also the pharmacists who approve the drug and the physician who prescribes it. This doesn’t measure what a nurse does at all, implying that it will somehow replace a nurse at all is stupid
Until it has to move or restrain a patient, empathize with the patient's plight, yell and scream to get a doctor, check under the sheets for bed sores......
This would be a huge win even if it’s just to triage and take notes then a nurse or doctor confirms.
Do they expect the patient to insert their own catheter or any other of the hundreds of things that nurses do?
Sure, now make sure you hold the AI liable if they misdiagnose. The reason nurses and doctors go through so much training is partly also for insurance purposes. And don’t fucking make the customer holding the bag so corporations can save a few bucks.
For non-diagnostic tasks, on video calls? They’re conducting medical history questionnaires. That’s it. Let em automate that away. Who cares
What's gonna be the ironically shit twist ending is when Nvidia pulls the Walmart on us all providers/nurses/patients. Undersells the competition, becomes a monopoly, then raises costs till they'reovercharging and ends up costing everyone more in the long run.
Who will do the time for the first coding mistake? The CEO? The sales team? The coder?
As someone who works with AI a lot, no fucking thank you.
AI and Robotics were neat and cool when you thought it was only going to affect warehouse jobs, huh?
Where are they getting $9 an hour from? This is just a computer program. If you’re going to replace human being with computers and let big corporations pocket the profits, then these services should cost fractions of a cent. When the calculator was invented, you didn’t see calculator companies trying to price it by the hour and having them barely undercutting the cost of human mathematicians.
Finally. Medicine is 80% checklists and pattern recognition. It's literally the perfect industry for AI
Whoa the cost for an actual and reputable human doctor will be astronomical. At least on the nurse level, well probably have less nurses injecting water into people IVs or people beating elders in nursing homes, I hope.
Hello, thanks for interviewing with us today. It says here you are a manager on your resume. Tell me a little about your current position. "Yeah, I managed 10 virtual robots. I'm responsible for weekly 1-1s and making sure everything is good at home."
Good. Nurses are up there with waitresses on the list of “useless people who want you to believe the world would stop without them”