{"id":128303,"date":"2026-08-03T19:10:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T19:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/128303\/"},"modified":"2026-08-03T19:10:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T19:10:37","slug":"new-york-city-nurses-say-ai-is-replacing-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/128303\/","title":{"rendered":"New York City nurses say AI is replacing them"},"content":{"rendered":"

Real journalists wrote and edited this (not AI)\u2014independent, community-driven journalism survives because you back it. Donate<\/a> to sustain Prism\u2019s mission and the humans behind it.<\/p>\n

Following the largest nurses strike<\/a> in New York City history, Marilyn Shuler and 11 of her co-workers returned to their jobs at Montefiore Hospitals in the Bronx in February, only to find that their work environment had changed in a major way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the time, Shuler worked in utilization review, a department that ascertains the need for medical care and whether care is covered by insurance. The veteran nurse, who worked at Montefiore for almost 40 years, had to begin using Datavant<\/a>, a tool used to abridge the process by which the hospital sends patient and care information to insurance companies. Datavant\u2019s website refers to itself as an AI platform.<\/p>\n

Shuler said she and other nurses thought the tool would just help process the backlog of cases created by the nurses strike. But when case volume returned to normal, the 12 nurses working in utilization review were told to continue using Datavant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In early July, after a few months of using the tool, Shuler was laid off from the position she held for six years. Her colleagues were all laid off too. They felt they had been replaced by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

Shuler\u2019s case and that of her colleagues, she said, is far from an outlier. Hospitals will continue to automate and eliminate the jobs of nurses and other workers through AI, Shuler added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Job automation keeps nurses up at night. It was a concern raised by nurses represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) earlier in the year, when 15,000 walked off the job<\/a> demanding a new contract.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cArtificial intelligence should never replace real human caring from a nurse,\u201d NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said in a press release<\/a> issued when the 12 nurses at Montefiore lost their job.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Montefiore representatives deny having replaced workers with Datavant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAs is often the case, the claims by NYSNA are inaccurate and misleading,\u201d Joe Solmonese, Montefiore\u2019s senior vice president for government relations and strategic communications, said in an email. \u201cWhat is true is that we are always investing in new technology to ensure the best care and outcomes for our patients and will continue to do so for the betterment of the people we serve.\u201d<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the hospital said that Datavant\u2019s tools are a nonclinical program that helps facilitate the paperwork process, but did not address whether the program uses AI.<\/p>\n

Shuler said the laid-off nurses did not receive proper notice from the hospital. A union representative told the nurses on May 6, National Nurses Day, that the hospital planned to eliminate the 12 utilization review positions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just can\u2019t believe that a machine can replace all the decades of \u2026 clinical judgment and knowledge that we have,\u201d Shuler told Prism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Job automation through AI is bound to impact nurses in other parts of the country too. Joe-Ann Fergus, the executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, said her union, which is engaged in a fierce contract battle<\/a> with the largest hospital network in the state, is pushing back against an AI future in which hospitals deprioritize workforce development. A future in which hospitals deskill their workers, she said, could be disastrous for patients and hospitals alike.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have already begun to see that in places where AI has been introduced around triaging,\u201d Fergus said. \u201cThe younger, newer clinicians, the more exposure they have to AI, and the earlier exposure they have to AI, the higher the risk of them deskilling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fergus said healthcare workers should have a background education, but that they should also supplement that with real experience in the field and trial and error. Reading X-ray scans, Fergus said, is an example of a practice that is enhanced by AI tools. But workers should still be able to know what they are looking at.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will lose the skill of doctors being able to read those tools as well, and when the inevitable happens that the system goes down, then nobody\u2019s going to know how to read the images,\u201d Fergus said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Using an AI system that does not account for the historical inequities of the healthcare industry, Fergus said, is also a deep concern. Fergus worries that hospitals might look to save money on the AI products they contract with and end up with a service that is not attuned<\/a> to serving a diverse population.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there\u2019s any issues of racism, or the system is not properly programmed for the population that it\u2019s in, then that additional programming of the AI can amplify the disparities that already exist and can actually result in injuries,\u201d Fergus said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite hospitals onboarding AI systems as an addition to workers\u2019 current workflows, Fergus said it is only a matter of time before hospitals look to automate jobs. She said most hospitals will likely see this as short-term savings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But if they don\u2019t create more staffing to maintain and continuously train the products, \u201cthen the systems become obsolete, and they become harmful to the patients,\u201d Fergus said.<\/p>\n

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Real journalists wrote and edited this (not AI)\u2014independent, community-driven journalism survives because you back it. Donate to sustain…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,4378,25,64235,1668,64236,49,21587,820,64237,64238,3423,5245,66,13072,64239,64240,1207,7318,2859],"class_list":["post-128303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-in-healthcare","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-datavant","tag-health-care","tag-health-care-workers","tag-healthcare","tag-hospitals","tag-labor","tag-montefiore","tag-montefiore-hospital","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-nurses","tag-nurses-strike","tag-the-bronx","tag-union","tag-workers","tag-workers-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}