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.
