06/19/2026
I just read this on Linked In from Rebecca Love, RN.
"This week, I received my first call from a Nurse Leader to tell me her hospital eliminated an entire department and jobs for over 50+ Nurses to be replaced with AI.
Here are the details:
On Friday, one of the largest hospital systems in the US, gave notice to their entire Virtual Nursing Team, over 50+ Nurses, that their jobs had been eliminated and their last day would be in August.
The nurses were told that their jobs were “administrative in function” – a critical “term” for legal classification in this space (one that warrants a future post on AI in healthcare).
These seasoned nurses, all helped build and worked as “Virtual nurses” supporting and on inpatient units across the hospitals, virtually.
The hospital had partnered with an outside AI company several years ago that installed cameras into patient rooms and ties to into TV screens, so that when an admission and discharge needed to be done, a virtual nurse would portal into the room via the TV and engage the patient on the admission and discharge.
The nursing team had done research on the of Virtual Nursing and outcomes that they wanted to publish, but had been denied the right to publish their findings, which showed they were saving the bedside nurses significant hours of time per patient; as well as showing their discharges significantly decreased 30 day re-admissions.
What was not widely understood by these virtual nurses, is that every time they were logged into the system to do the virtual nursing, every engagement, every note, was being recorded and tracked.
Not for "quality assurance purposes", but to collect the data and the interaction, to train the AI Model, to reach a point where AI agents could instead do the job.
And that day is now here.
These nurses jobs were eliminated, there were no offers to take a bedside role or to take another position at all in the hospital. This was a direct elimination of their job to be done by AI.
The system, is saving around $5 million dollars annually on salary and benefits of these nurses.
Which now they will use those dollars to invest into these AI technologies, as they told the virtual nurses they are continuing to install cameras in all patient rooms.
This allows them to capture and record more data to further train “AI” on the jobs and interactions of healthcare professionals and patients. You can draw what that may mean for the future.
But for today, over 50 incredibly talented, experienced and dedicated nurses have lost their jobs to AI.
And for the bedside nurses at this hospital, they will be getting more work and responsibility to be the clinically licensed clinician responsible for the documentation/note that the will produce.
This is the first such instance I am aware of; but will not be the last.
We must start having hard conversations about AI impact to nursing careers at all levels."
