Techround. The pros and cons of AI nurses
Healthcare systems across the world are under pressure. Staff shortages, aging populations, and post-pandemic burnout have left hospitals and clinics scrambling to maintain quality care – especially in rural areas where coverage is stretched thin.
In response, some are turning to AI-powered nurses to help ease the burden. But are they a smart solution – or a step too far?
Techround reached out to several experts posing this question, including Vaclav Vicalek, fractional CTO at 555vCTO.com and founder of Hiswai.com, an AI-powered research and insights platform.
What experts say about AI nurses
So should AI be ‘nurses’?
“AI should be seen as an augmenting tool, rather than an outright replacement,” says Vaclav Vincalek, founder of Hiswai.com and fractional CTO at 555vCTO.com. He sees value in AI reducing paperwork – but warns about the dangers of relying too heavily on automation in such a high-stakes field.
“Just like in most other sectors, AI can be deployed in healthcare to remove mundane and repetitive tasks from humans. So in terms of AI nurses, they could be deployed to reduce administrative tasks. This takes a mundane, repetitive task out of the equation, allowing human nurses to channel their efforts into actual patient care instead of ‘paperwork’.”
“For example, in a rural, understaffed hospital, you could have an AI-driven patient monitoring system like that of Mercy, which monitors patients in at least seven states across the US. This would free up human nurses to focus on direct, hands-on patient care.”
But Vincalek cautions that the sector must tread carefully:
“Healthcare is a sensitive sector. It needs human touch, intuition, empathy and ethical judgments to be successful, and AI simply cannot replicate that.”
“Because of that, the adoption of AI nurses comes with significant challenges. Since healthcare is so sensitive, leaders need to consider ethical concerns around patient data privacy, as well as algorithmic biases. Plus, teams may run the risk of overly relying on automated decision making. Remember IBM’s Watson? It wanted to revolutionise oncology care for patients and was scrapped after recommending unsafe treatment based on flawed data.”
“So, not only is the downside of AI nurses that we’d lose the human touch, but we’d risk incorrect and possibly dangerous diagnoses and treatments if the data they use to train the AI system is incomplete or flawed.”
The real-world pressure driving AI adoption
The article went on to mention the UK’s National Health System as it continues to face staffing shortages and long wait times. Older facilities, combined with an ageing population, make it even harder for nurses to keep up with growing demand – especially in smaller communities.
Other experts in the Techround article echoed Vincalek’s point: that AI can support, but not replace, skilled human care. The risk isn’t just technical failure – it’s the loss of compassion, nuance, and human insight.
AI adoption for your business
Is your organization considering AI adoption? Wondering where to begin and how to integrate it into your basic system architecture? Reach out to the experts at 555vCTO.com today and let’s work together to design a system that even non-technical stakeholders can understand and use to make business decisions.