Episode

Hospitals pull back on robotic nursing assistants

Podcast: Marketplace All-in-One
Published: Jun 29, 2026
Duration seconds: 432
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Canonical source: https://www.marketplace.org/episode/2026/06/29/hospitals-pull-back-on-robotic-nursing-assistants
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Summary

There’s a longstanding nursing shortage in the U.S. that's only expected to get worse. Some hospitals have experimented with robotic nursing assistants to lighten the load, like a model known as Moxi that rolled out in 2019. They’re kind of R2D2-meets-Rosie-the-robots and were designed to handle non-patient-facing tasks like transporting lab samples. But many hospitals eventually pulled them from operation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Varsha Bansal, reporter at Proof News, about what went wrong.