In 2019, Ascension received an award from a company called AvaSure. The “AvaPrize” was bestowed upon the hospital chain because of its embrace of a new cost-cutting innovation: robots.
Traditionally, Ascension, like other hospitals, sent nurses’ aides into the rooms of patients who needed close supervision. Left untended, these patients, many with dementia or psychiatric illnesses, might get out of bed and hurt themselves.
But in the years before the pandemic, some Ascension hospitals switched course. Going forward, they would generally assign nurses’ aides only to patients who were deemed at high risk of dying by su----e.
For other patients, aides would be replaced by AvaSure’s TeleSitters. By 2019, Ascension had installed 450 of the robots in more than 50 of its hospitals. The devices — essentially a video camera mounted on a metal pole — send live footage to an off-site command center, where workers talk to patients through speakers in the machine.
But at Ascension’s Genesys hospital in Michigan, nurses said patients were confused by the disembodied voices coming from TeleSitters. There were sometimes not enough robots to go around.
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