IT giant wants to replace healthcare staff with artificial intelligence
Replacing healthcare staff with AI-driven “digital agents” to care for patients isn’t science fiction. This is what Nvidia is doing with its partner Hippocratic AI.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there will be a shortfall of 10 million healthcare workers by 2030, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. In France alone, there are over 25,000 vacant positions for paramedical professionals. How can we counter this haemorrhage? By improving conditions for staff who are often overexploited and poorly regarded? Unfortunately, no! Processor manufacturer Nvidia has another idea: replace them with AIs. The company has teamed up with Hippocratic AI to develop generative “health agents”.
These permanently available, tireless virtual nurses are based on Polaris, the large language model (LLM) developed by Hippocratic AI. This is the first model ever designed to generate real-time conversations between patients and an AI.
On the machinery side, Nvidia’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) micro servers are in charge. They also use another “in-house” brick called Nvidia Inference Microservice (NIM). This accelerates speech recognition while minimizing latency. Latency is an essential factor in ensuring maximum reactivity during interactions, and in appearing credible in order to win patients’ trust.
Better than a nurse
At this stage, health agents are limited to talking to patients via telephone or video to help them. They know how to manage areas related to health risk assessment, chronic diseases, pre-operative and post-operative examinations. These digital voice agents powered by generative AI must therefore behave as a human being would. To test them and ensure their effectiveness, Hippocratic AI has recruited registered nurses and doctors in the USA. To carry out conversational assessments, these healthcare staff posed as patients. The company claims that Polaris performs far better than ChatGPT-4, LLaMA-2 70B and even flesh-and-blood healthcare staff.
Even if they are very powerful, these digital agents are a call for concern. They will replace humans at the patient’s bedside, when the latter will do the work of a robot, applying dressings, giving injections and connecting pipes. The world turned upside down.
