Family blames AI hospital system after woman dies waiting five days for ICU bed in Brazil

Family Blames AI Hospital System After Woman Dies Waiting for ICU Bed

A recently implemented state-run hospital management system delayed the urgent care that Rebeca Cardoso Tenente Molina needed, her family alleges. A family in Brazil is blaming an AI-powered medical system for the untimely death of 32-year-old Rebeca Cardoso Tenente Molina. Brazilian news outlet MG1 reported on Molina's death late last week. Her family alleges that a state-run AI system used to manage hospital bed allocation incorrectly assessed her condition and waited too long to transfer Molina to an intensive care unit. Molina died just hours after reaching the ICU. "What we saw was that doctors lost the autonomy to decide if a patient is very seriously ill," Sâmela Cardoso Tenente Furtado, a lawyer and Molina's twin sister, told MG1. Too low a score According to MG1, Molina was first hospitalized on June 2 with what was believed to be gallstones. She ended up at a hospital in São João Nepomuceno, a municipality in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Her condition quickly deteriorated, and Molina reportedly requested a transfer to an ICU. Last month, Minas Gerais changed over to a new management system -- called Core-MG -- in its state hospitals, which incorporates AI. And the family claims this system wrongly downgraded the severity of Molina's health problems, delaying the care she needed. At one point, they even went to court to try compelling a speedier transfer. Due to this downgrade, the family argues, she had to wait five days until she was transferred to a hospital ICU in another municipality 186 miles (300 kilometers) away, where she soon died. Molina's cause of death is currently listed as septic shock, but doctors are still investigating whether other conditions, such as botulism, may have played a role, according to the family. The state's response The State Health Department of Minas Gerais told MG1 that Core-MG has not fundamentally changed the criteria for managing someone's care or searching for vacant hospital beds. The department further claimed that Molina was immediately registered into the system and that the choice of allocated hospital beds isn't only affected by geographic proximity but also by the availability of beds according to a patient's clinical needs. The family, however, argues that Core-MG failed to accurately assess Molina's health, even as worsening test results came in, and that it did a poorer job than trained medical professionals would have in the same situation. "She would have been a 10, and the system only accepted her as a 6.8," Furtado told MG1. "She wasn't just a number or a protocol within the system. She had a family, she had dreams, and a whole life ahead of her." This isn't the only instance of people blaming AI for worse medical care. While some studies have suggested that AI systems might be better than doctors at diagnosing some health issues, others have suggested AI can reinforce existing biases within health care. Other recent research has also indicated that popular consumer-facing systems like ChatGPT Health are prone to underestimating medical emergencies.

Woman's Death Blamed on Hospital's AI System

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech As AI finds its way into hospital systems around the world, the case of one Brazilian woman makes it clear that the tech doesn't have to diagnose patients to determine whether they live or die. According to Brazilian news publication MG1, 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. In interviews with MG1, Molina's 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 São João 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. 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. According to Molina's sister and family lawyer Sâmela Cardoso Tenente Furtado, the AI hospital-management system assigned the patient a much lower "score" than the one her condition actually reflected. This automatic scoring, completed by Brazil's State Regulation Operations Center (Core-MG) using AI tools, is alleged to have played the deciding role on delaying transfer to an ICU bed. "What we saw was that doctors lost the autonomy to decide if a patient is very seriously ill," Furtado told MG1. "The 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's the Core." In her interview, Furtado describes a flawed and inflexible system which refused to budge, even as test data showed her sister's condition taking a turn for the worst. "She would have been a 10, and the system only accepted her as a 6.8," Furtado continued. "So she couldn't progress properly in the system because a patient at 8, a patient at 6.9 would jump ahead of her. And the system wouldn't accept increasing her severity level within the system because of the tests that were constantly feeding it data." "My 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," Molina's sister told MG1. "They have families, they had dreams, they had a whole life ahead of them." In an official statement shared after the AI-system's launch on May 19th, Minas Gerais' Deputy Secretary of Health, Poliana Cardoso Lopes said that "Core provides a bed map that is updated three times a day. With this, it will be possible to have much more control over the process and generate better data on the clinical condition and needs of each person waiting for a bed." Responding to Molina's death, the state health department told MG1 that transfers are determined based on the availability of beds that fit a patient's clinical needs, and added that Core-MG has not fundamentally altered the protocol for transferring patients to other facilities. More on AI in healthcare: America's Largest City Hospital System Ready to Start Replacing Radiologists With AI, Its CEO Says