It sounds like something from a science fiction novel, but Alabama officials’ plan to use robots to improve care for rural pregnant women and their babies is real.
During a January White House roundtable touting the first grants to states under a new $50 billion rural health fund, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz called the idea “pretty cool.” Later that day, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, said it is decidedly not cool. And obstetricians and others chimed in on social media to express alarm, with one political activist calling it a “dystopian horror story.”
The disparate responses highlight how excitement over the tech-heavy ideas states pitched in their applications for the federal Rural Health Transformation Program conflicts with the reality that there simply aren’t enough health workers to serve patients in many rural communities. Now, as states prepare to spend their first-year awards, tension is mounting, and nowhere is that strain more visible than in Alabama.
Oz has lauded the state’s proposal to invest in the relatively new technology of robotic ultrasounds.
“Alabama has no OB-GYNs in many of their counties,” Oz said, sitting with President Donald Trump and Cabinet members. The dearth of care, he said, prompted the proposal to use robots for ultrasounds on pregnant women.
Britta Cedergren directs the Alabama Perinatal Quality Collaborative and has a firm grip on reality: “No one is using autonomous robots.”
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