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Nurses have a tough job. AI tools promise to take care of some of the more mundane and repetitive tasks that eat up so much time and, by extension, money in healthcare. But often these AI efficiency initiatives can be a bit top down without much consideration for how workers actually do their jobs. So, some nurses unions are bargaining over AI. Claire Keenan-Kurgan of Interlochen Public Radio has this story.
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Nurses want a say in the rollout of AI. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino. Nurses have a tough job.
AI tools promise to take care of some of the more mundane and repetitive tasks that eat up so much time and by extension money in healthcare. But often these AI efficiency initiatives can be a bit top down without much consideration
for how workers actually do their jobs. So some nurses unions are bargaining over AI. Claire Keenan-Kurgen of Interlochen Public Radio has this story.
A few months ago, the nurses union at Munson Medical Center, a hospital in Traverse City, Michigan, organized a rally. We're the Traverse City Months and Nurses Association.
Yeah! Union President Laura Nielsen stood at the front of the room, listing the union's demands in their new contract. Things like higher staffing numbers
and also regulations around artificial intelligence. We understand technology is coming. We generally want it to be good for us and our patients. But right now there's a lot of unknowns.
What we don't want technology to do is replace nursing judgment. We don't want it to take jobs. Companies are developing AI tools
that do everything from taking notes on appointments to proposing real diagnoses based on someone's medical records. This winter, a nurses union in New York City
with more than 10,000 members got protections from AI in their contract. These unions say that even if AI tools can do some of the work of nursing,
it wouldn't be the same as a nurses physical presence in a room. say we're checking blood pressure and the cuff wasn't, blood pressure cuff wasn't on the patient appropriately.
James Walker is a critical care nurse at Munson, who's on the Union Bargaining Committee. And so that number is just pulled into the system without verifying whether it's accurate,
that value, it could potentially lead to a wrong decision. Max Topaz, a professor of nursing at Columbia University, says new technology is often just handed to nurses and they're forced to use it.
Frequently, nurses are not involved and designing those technologies and thinking about how these technologies are going to be integrated into practice. We'll be right back.
Hey, everyone. I'm Rima Chavez, host of the Marketplace Podcast. This is Uncomfortable. We all have that one financial task we're putting off.
Maybe it's a bill you need to dispute, some paperwork you've got to submit, an account you've been neglecting. Personally, I've got a pretty long list. show that it's much easier to get things done if you do them alongside someone else.
So on July 1st, that is what we're going to do. I'm hosting a virtual co-working event where we all show up with at least one financial task we've been avoiding and spend an hour finally dealing with it together. So please bring the thing you've been putting off, I'll bring mine, and we'll see you
on July 1st. You can sign up for the virtual event at marketplace.org. You're listening to Marketplace Tech, a Megan McCarty-Corino.
We're back with interlock and public radios Claire Keenan-Kergen. In a recent study looking at the use of AI in health care, researchers from Stanford and Harvard found even top performing AI models
from Anthropic in Google, produced 12 to 15 severely harmful errors per 100 cases. The worst performing models made mistakes in 40 out of 100 cases. This is exactly why nurses are concerned. These technologies,
they have to be vetted and validated. And we need to know what the error rates are. Jen Standfest, Chief Nursing Officer at Munson Medical Center, represented the hospital at the bargaining table.
And the growth of AI in healthcare really can be a positive thing. I mean, it is trying to support a reduction in some of the clerical tasks. Clerical tasks that cause burnout, she says, that AI could reduce. It's a really important space and we want to get it right.
If the hospital does decide to buy new AI software, nurses here in northern Michigan will now have a voice in how it's rolled out. That's Interlochen Public Radio's Claire Keenan-Kurgen. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino and that's Marketplace Tech.
This is APM.
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