Alabama’s plan to put robots in maternity care proves controversial | Latest Tech News
It seems like one thing from a science fiction novel, but Alabama officers’ plan to use robots to improve care for rural pregnant girls and their infants 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 thought “pretty cool.”
Later that day, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the impartial from Vermont, said it’s decidedly not cool. And obstetricians and others chimed in on social media to categorical alarm, with one political activist calling it a “dystopian horror story.”
Alabama officers plan to use robots to improve care for rural pregnant girls. Virtual Health Hub
The disparate responses spotlight how pleasure over the tech-heavy concepts states pitched in their purposes for the federal Rural Health Transformation Program conflicts with the fact that there merely aren’t enough health staff to serve sufferers in many rural communities. Now, as states put together to spend their first-year awards, stress is mounting, and nowhere is that pressure more seen than in Alabama.
Oz has lauded the state’s proposal to invest in the comparatively 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 girls.
Britta Cedergren directs the Alabama Perinatal Quality Collaborative and has a firm grip on actuality: “No one is using autonomous robots.”
While robotic ultrasounds are a “really neat technology,” she said, they aren’t yet getting used in the state. Instead, clinicians offering obstetric care lean on telephone consultations and — when tools and web can be found — telehealth.
The aim, she said, is to “support places where there is no care.”
Cedergren is an element of a number of state maternal and fetal health teams and works daily with docs, hospitals, and first responders. While enhanced technology is significant for affected person care, it’s not a substitute for a well-trained workforce and a coordinated care and data system, she said.
In 2024, the most latest 12 months for which data is obtainable, Alabama’s toddler mortality charge was 7.1 deaths per 1,000 live births. The nationwide charge was 5.5 per 1,000 live births, according to provisional data launched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Alabama has no OB-GYNs in many of their counties,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz. Virtual Health Hub
Hospital-based obstetric unit closures, which often lead to a loss of health care suppliers who can care for expectant moms and their infants, are a long-standing, ongoing pattern in rural America. But Alabama’s loss of providers has been notably profound.
In 1980, 45 of the state’s 55 rural counties had hospital-based obstetric providers. By 2025, only 15 supplied such care, according to state data. And the losses aren’t slowing. Five hospital obstetric models closed in 2023 and 2024, including in three rural counties: Monroe, Marengo, and Clarke.
Katy Backes Kozhimannil, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, discovered that closures in distant areas lead to an increase in preterm births, a main trigger of toddler mortality.
“People will be pregnant and give birth in communities all over the place,” she said. “You have to be able to get to a place where you can be cared for.”
Nearly all 50 states’ purposes for the Rural Health Transformation Program declared workforce shortages and maternal health wants as priorities, but only Alabama proposed utilizing robots to fill the hole. The rural fund, which Congress created as a last-minute sweetener in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer season, inspired states to be inventive, be modern, and pitch tech options.
Alabama was awarded $203 million for the first of this system’s 5 years. Among practically a dozen rural health initiatives, the state’s software included bolstering its rural workforce as properly as bettering maternal and fetal health.
Mike Presley, a spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, which is overseeing the plan, said no one was accessible for an interview about telerobotic ultrasounds.
A clinic in the distant Canadian village of La Loche makes use of an ultrasound robot (pictured). They have only two on-site nurse practitioners and rotating docs. Virtual Health Hub
LoRissia Autery, an obstetrics and gynecology specialist in rural Alabama northwest of Birmingham, said the robots gained’t lower maternal and toddler mortality. There are nuances, she said, to doing ultrasounds.
Many of her sufferers have high-risk pregnancies with diabetes, high blood pressure, and hepatitis C, she said. She said she worries about the sort of care that shall be given to her sufferers, many of whom drive an hour or more to get to her, if robots are used instead of a skilled specialist.
“When people come in, they’re like, ‘Wow, like, technology these days.’ It’s something they’ve never seen before or even used.”
Julie Fontaine
“It takes away just the care that we need to have for women,” said Autery, who co-founded Walker Women’s Specialists. The clinic contains three docs, attracts sufferers from 5 counties, and might use an extra doctor to meet the demand, Autery said.
“Probably for the past six or seven years, we’ve been putting out feelers trying to find a fourth partner,” Autery said. “It’s difficult for a variety of reasons.”
In his social media remarks to Oz, Vermont’s Sanders called the dearth of rural health care suppliers in the U.S. an “international embarrassment.”
When working with sufferers, Julie Fontaine, pictured, connects the robotic ultrasound machine to a tele-sonographer at a control station in Saskatoon. Julie Fontaine
“In the richest country on earth, we need more doctors, nurses, dentists and mental health counselors, not more robots,” Sanders wrote on the social platform X.
At least one nation is utilizing robots paired with skilled staff to lower deaths.
In the distant Canadian village of La Loche, Julie Fontaine operates an ultrasound robot at a clinic with two on-site nurse practitioners and rotating docs. She said sufferers just like the robot because it saves them the time and expense of touring to a larger regional health care facility six to seven hours away.
“When people come in, they’re like, ‘Wow, like, technology these days,’” said Fontaine, a member of the Métis people in northern Saskatchewan. “It’s something they’ve never seen before or even used.”
When working with sufferers, Fontaine connects the robotic ultrasound machine to a tele-sonographer at a control station in Saskatoon. The sonographer then remotely operates a robotic arm on the machine. A radiologist, who could be wherever, reads the scan’s report and sends it back to the household doctor in La Loche, said Ivar Mendez, a neurosurgeon and the director of Canada’s Virtual Health Hub. Most infants in Canada, he said, are delivered by household docs or midwives, not specialists.
“The most important thing is the identification of a high-risk pregnancy early enough so you can intervene,” said Mendez, who added that the robotic ultrasound is “as good as the in-person ultrasound” but can’t be used when a affected person wants a more invasive vaginal ultrasound. The mortality charge for moms and newborns in the north, web site of the La Loche clinic, is 20 to 25 instances higher than in the remaining of the nation, he said.
“One of the reasons is that there’s no availability of prenatal ultrasonography in those communities, so pregnant women have to travel to cities and they’re put up at hotels,” he said.
In a 2022 paper, Mendez and his group at the University of Saskatchewan examined 87 telerobotic ultrasounds and discovered that 70% of the time, the robotic ultrasound made journey for care pointless. Nearly all the sufferers said they’d use the robot again.
The same robotic ultrasound technology was accepted in 2017 for use in the U.S.
Nicolas Lefebvre, chairman and chief government of the robot’s creator and producer, AdEchoTech, said the company has “U.S. maternity-specific projects that are currently under preparation.” The average price of a robot shall be $250,000 to $350,000, according to AdEchoTech’s U.S.-based business development marketing consultant.
Using robotic ultrasounds is one half of Alabama’s proposed maternal and fetal health initiative, according to the state’s software. Acknowledging loss of hospital obstetric models, officers said they deliberate to join smaller rural suppliers and health care amenities that lack “high-quality maternal and fetal health services” to regional care hubs that can present the providers digitally, including through telerobotic ultrasound.
For their workforce initiative, state officers proposed training applications for docs, emergency providers, and nurse-midwives.
The estimated required funding for the maternal and fetal health initiative is $24 million over 5 years. Alabama officers proposed $309.75 million for their workforce initiative over 5 years.
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