A family in Brazil is blaming an AI-powered medical system for the untimely death of 32-year-old Rebeca Cardoso Tenente Molina.<\/p>\n
Brazilian news outlet MG1 reported<\/a> on Molina\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we saw was that doctors lost the autonomy to decide if a patient is very seriously ill.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWhat we saw was that doctors lost the autonomy to decide if a patient is very seriously ill,\u201d S\u00e2mela Cardoso Tenente Furtado, a lawyer and Molina\u2019s twin sister, told MG1.<\/p>\n Too low a score <\/p>\n According to MG1, Molina was first hospitalized on June 2 with what was believed to be gallstones. She ended up at a hospital in S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o Nepomuceno, a municipality in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Her condition quickly deteriorated, and Molina reportedly requested a transfer to an ICU.<\/p>\n Last month, Minas Gerais changed<\/a> over to a new management system\u2014called Core-MG\u2014in its state hospitals, which incorporates AI. And the family claims this system wrongly downgraded the severity of Molina\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Molina\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The state\u2019s response <\/p>\n The State Health Department of Minas Gerais told MG1 that Core-MG has not fundamentally changed the criteria for managing someone\u2019s 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\u2019t only affected by geographic proximity but also by the availability of beds according to a patient\u2019s clinical needs.<\/p>\n The family, however, argues that Core-MG failed to accurately assess Molina\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cShe would have been a 10, and the system only accepted her as a 6.8,\u201d Furtado told MG1. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t just a number or a protocol within the system. She had a family, she had dreams, and a whole life ahead of her.\u201d<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the only instance of people blaming AI for worse medical care. While some studies have suggested<\/a> that AI systems might be better than doctors at diagnosing some health issues, others have suggested AI can reinforce<\/a> existing biases within health care. Other recent research has also indicated<\/a> that popular consumer-facing systems like ChatGPT Health are prone to underestimating medical emergencies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A family in Brazil is blaming an AI-powered medical system for the untimely death of 32-year-old Rebeca Cardoso…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":738690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[62,49,48,84,5432,392],"class_list":["post-738689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ai","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/738690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}