We are living in the future, for better and for worse.
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A friendly one-armed, bright-eyed robot is roving the hallways of Medical City Dallas’ Heart and Spine hospitals, helping nurses with routine tasks that previously took time away from patient care.
Nicknamed Moxi and regarded as one of the staff, the robot is equipped with sensors to help it navigate, and even anticipate people’s movements, as it travels across hospital floors. Medical City Dallas partnered last fall with Austin-based artificial intelligence firm Diligent Robotics Inc. to become the first North Texas hospital to employ a robot full time in a clinical setting.
“When we were opening up the hospital back in October, one of the things we wanted to really focus on was being an innovation center and bringing new technology to the health care setting,” Medical City Chief Operating Officer Josh Kemph told The Dallas Morning News.
When a nurse is interacting with it in a way that would normally trigger an error message, Moxi instead emits pleasant beeps and chirps to notify them. Some patients even have their own names for the assistant, which has its own Instagram account run by Diligent.
But Moxi is so much more than just a pretty face.
Texas will face a shortage of more than 71,000 nurses by 2030, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. And with the demand for nurses expected to only continue increasing, Medical City Dallas director of surgical and procedural services Stefanie Beavers says she hopes it will also make it easier for the hospital’s existing workforce to optimize their day-to-day work.
“This really offers health care facilities an opportunity for the nursing workforce to focus on patient care and be directly at the bedside versus taking them away, and allowing their time to be truly dedicated to patient care tasks,” Beavers said.
It never crosses the threshold into patient care, instead delivering things like blood samples back and forth to a lab and updating patients’ medical records instantaneously for hospital staff.
“She’s really meant to be a team member that’s supporting you in the background,” Beavers said.
For now, at least, Moxie is a modern version of the FBI mail robot, which does simple drudge work like delivering specimens and allowing the human nurses to do more important things. It’s also a lot cheaper to employ than human nurses, or human nurses’ aides, and in the way of driverless cars, it’s just a matter of time before they have the capability to cross that threshold into patient care. That may be 20 or 30 years down the line, but it’s out there somewhere. I just hope we can have a productive conversation about what that will mean for the rest of us before it happens.