Nurses, who make up the largest part of the health care workforce, are getting more vocal about the risks posed by clinical artificial intelligence to their jobs and patient care as the technology makes deeper inroads into the practice of medicine.
At Montefiore hospital in the Bronx, laid-off nurses have raised the alarm about administrative AI they say is replacing them. Across the country in California, nurses at Kaiser Permanente are striking and picketing against the AI surveilling their work and playing a growing role in patient care. Collectively, the loudest voices have come from unions like National Nurses United, which represents over 200,000 nurses, including those at Kaiser and Montefiore.
As that workplace advocacy and bargaining continue, educators and researchers also have their eyes on the future: They’re trying to build solutions to support the next generation of nurses through training and involvement in how patient-facing AI is developed and deployed. By giving nurses a voice in AI’s inevitable disruption of health care, they hope to make the current adversarial relationship more collaborative.
