As AI finds its way into hospital systems around the world, the case of one Brazilian woman makes it clear that the tech doesn\u2019t have to diagnose patients to determine whether they live or die.<\/p>\n
According to Brazilian news publication MG1<\/a>, 32-year old Rebeca Cardoso Tenente Molina died after a state-run AI system for assigning hospital beds forced her to wait five days to transfer to an intensive care unit.<\/p>\n In interviews with MG1, Molina\u2019s family members explained that the AI system delayed her access to the care she needed. Prior to her death, Molina was hospitalized in the small municipality of S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o Nepomuceno after seeking medical treatment for gallstones. As her health rapidly deteriorated, Molina waited for an ICU bed in the state of Oliveira to open up, at a hospital about 186 miles away.<\/p>\n Though the family went as far as pursuing emergency legal action against the hospital system to get her transferred, the move was significantly delayed. The family now believes that five-day wait was fatal, MG1 reported.<\/p>\n According to Molina\u2019s sister and family lawyer S\u00e2mela Cardoso Tenente Furtado, the AI hospital-management system assigned the patient a much lower \u201cscore\u201d than the one her condition actually reflected. This automatic scoring, completed by Brazil\u2019s State Regulation Operations Center (Core-MG) using AI tools, is alleged to have played the deciding role<\/a> on delaying transfer to an ICU bed.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we saw was that doctors lost the autonomy to decide if a patient is very seriously ill,\u201d Furtado told MG1. \u201cThe one who has to accept whether a patient is seriously ill is no longer the doctor who is there experiencing that reality with the patient, it\u2019s the Core.\u201d<\/p>\n In her interview, Furtado describes a flawed and inflexible system which refused to budge, even as test data showed her sister\u2019s condition taking a turn for the worst.<\/p>\n \u201cShe would have been a 10, and the system only accepted her as a 6.8,\u201d Furtado continued. \u201cSo she couldn\u2019t progress properly in the system because a patient at 8, a patient at 6.9 would jump ahead of her. And the system wouldn\u2019t accept increasing her severity level within the system because of the tests that were constantly feeding it data.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy sister, other people, are not just numbers, they are not just protocols, they are not just a CPF [Brazilian tax ID number] thrown into the system,\u201d Molina\u2019s sister told MG1. \u201cThey have families, they had dreams, they had a whole life ahead of them.\u201d<\/p>\n