I attended the National Nurses United webinar on the dangerous use of AI in healthcare. This is a serious issue, as I’ve said before, and the way they’re proposing to use AI for in healthcare is probably not even legal. But 2 stories stood out to me in the webinar about healthcare tech failures.
One person told the story about an automated shift change report that just makes a sheet with no human to human handoff between actual healthcare workers. In this case the automated sheet failed to show that the person coming into the hospital had “no immune system” and had the nurse not made the extra step of checking the patient’s chart, they would’ve put the immune compromised person in with the patient who had covid and flu. In this case the problem could’ve been solved by NEVER putting covid and flu patients in with non-infected patients. People with immune systems shouldn’t be sickened at the hospital either! It’s a preventable harm and the hospital shouldn’t be putting infected and uninfected patients together at all, ever.
Another story was that the automated system failed to alert the healthcare worker that the patient had covid, and the healthcare worker saw the patient without PPE. In this case universal masking would’ve solved that problem. After all, even if a patient hasn’t yet tested for covid, the patient could have covid! Especially in hospitals where they’re clearly taking zero effort to prevent the spread of covid right in the hospital.
These stories frankly are more about lack of infection control measures, with automation tools exacerbating the issue. Infection control measures are absent at hospitals, and hospitals are therefore deliberately infecting patients, because we know they know better — because they used to isolate covid patients, as is the right thing to do, and they used to have healthcare workers wearing masks.
If you don’t want to be sickened while seeking healthcare, I highly recommend writing to the White House like I did:
CDC HICPAC and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) need to require hospitals to implement infection prevention, and stop sickening patients with a preventable disease. Healthcare workers need to wear N95 / respirator masks, and covid patients need to be isolated from uninfected patients. Common sense has been abandoned in many hospitals. Unmasked nurses entering the rooms of covid positive patients. Healthcare workers working while sick with covid or flu. Cancer units without mask requirements. Hospitals that mix covid patients with other patients. All of this is preventable harm, and should be prevented.
To the governor and state reps I replaced “CDC HICPAC and CMS” with “the state government” instead.
Feel free to take this to your representatives as examples where infection control is needed in healthcare settings. That’s what I did. Somebody needs to reign these hospital corporations in, and have patients, and healthcare workers, protected.
I have also written my reps about the wildly dangerous harm that will absolutely come from replacing healthcare workers with “AI nurse-bots” — the worst AI hype idea ever.
