Big Tech Wants to Uberfy Nursing: Understanding the Dangers
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“We have to push back hard and demand answers like, why can’t these hospitals and facilities pay their workers a living wage? Why can’t they provide a set number of hours? Why can’t nurses have more control over their schedules?”
Katie Wells, PhD, Senior Fellow on AI in Healthcare, AI NOW Institute
A new report from the AI NOW Institute is sounding the alarm about a slew of gig-work nursing platforms that promise flexibility for workers and lower labor costs for facilities, but do so at the expense of workers’ rights and healthcare regulation.
Thanks to the rise of gig work platforms such as Uber, companies like Clipboard Health, KARE Technologies, Nursa, ShiftKey, and more are attempting to deregulate US healthcare following the gig work platform playbook.
We spoke to the author of this groundbreaking report, Katie Wells, PhD, senior fellow on AI in healthcare, to understand how these apps affect workers and what their deregulation campaign means for the nation’s health.
The Rise of the Gig Economy & The Fall of Workers’ Rights
The World Economic Forum defines the gig economy as “a platform where providers cater to customer needs using the digital platform within a short time frame and in turn the customer pays for the services obtained using the same platform.”
Crucially, gig work platforms like Uber and TaskRabbit, and most nursing gig platforms, classify their workers as independent contractors, which puts them at a huge disadvantage.
According to Human Rights Watch, “Under US federal and most state labor laws, independent contractors are not entitled to wage and labor protections guaranteed to employees, such as minimum wage, overtime pay, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and paid sick leave.”
“The growth of digital labor platforms, fueled by the promise that workers are free to set their own schedules and be their own boss, has undermined decades of US labor law regulation and enforcement, denying workers hard-won rights to an adequate standard of living and safe and healthy working conditions,” Human Rights Watch reports.
As of 2021, 16 percent of all Americans have used a gig work platform at least once.
Giants in this arena, like Uber, promised workers ultimate flexibility, but the data paints a stark picture of worker and consumer exploitation instead.
Uber has a long history of strike-breaking, underpaying drivers, devious legal strategies, anti-consumer surge pricing ploys, an internal culture of sexual harassment, discrimination against the disabled, and thousands of cases of sexual assault by their drivers.
And recently, tech giants have decided they want to conquer a new industry with the same playbook: healthcare.
Healthcare: The Latest Target of Silicon Valley Deregulation
According to the report, “Uber for Nursing Part II: How Gig Nursing Platforms Are Lobbying States to Deregulate Healthcare,” gig nursing platforms have received incredible financial support and interest in recent years.
- Clipboard Health, IntelyCare, and ShiftKey are each valued at $1 billion each
- ShiftKey raised $300 million from private equity alone
- Gig nursing platforms now exist in all 50 states
- Fast Company named ShiftKey one of the most innovative companies of 2024
- Business Insider named Clipboard Health as one of the most promising start-ups of 2023
Gig nursing platforms use AI-driven apps to set pay rates for shifts, monitor nurse performance metrics, and use that data to determine whether a nurse is allowed to bid on future shifts. Some platforms have nurses bid against each other in a race to the bottom, accepting only the lowest bid.
If a nurse gets sick or misses too many shifts, they can be barred from picking up new shifts or kicked off the platform entirely.
Worse still, these healthcare gig work platforms are engaged in a coordinated lobbying campaign to deregulate US healthcare and carve out exceptions for themselves, so they don’t have to comply with the minimum regulations and requirements that apply to other staffing agencies that serve travel nurses or locum tenens physicians, for example.
According to the AI NOW report,
These platforms are trying to convince policymakers that their business model is not that of a healthcare staffing agency, and that instead they should be recognized as a “healthcare worker platform” or a “healthcare technology platform.” In doing so, these gig nursing platforms “are following the path of Uber, which exempted itself from regulation in dozens of states by convincing policymakers that it was not a transportation company.
In June 2026, Dr. Wells was asked to provide testimony before the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, and the experience was sobering.
Dr. Wells says, “I am glad that the experience gave me the opportunity to find allies working on these critical labor issues in healthcare. Healthcare gig platforms echo Uber’s rise perfectly. There was broken social infrastructure that rolled out the red carpet for Silicon Valley to show up and claim to have a flashy new solution.”
“To me, this gig nursing platform push is just the latest reflection of a broken healthcare infrastructure and uneven levers of power,” says Dr. Wells.
US Healthcare: A Crisis Ripe for Exploitation
It is true that US healthcare has created fertile ground for Silicon Valley grifters to exploit. For decades, the nursing elite have worked closely with legacy media to claim that there is a nursing shortage. A clever moniker that implies a supply-side issue.
“We have a nursing shortage, thus we need more people to go to nursing school–problem solved!”
This framing has been highly lucrative for the nursing education sector but has done nothing to stem the tide of nurses burning out and leaving the profession, or even killing themselves. Nurses are 18 percent more likely to die by suicide than the average population for a reason.
What US nursing actually has is a retention crisis. Today, there are actually hundreds of thousands more licensed nurses available to work but not employed as nurses than there are nursing job openings, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
So while it is true that the median age of RNs is 50 and we do always need a strong pipeline of new nurses graduating and joining the workforce, the far bigger issue is nurses leaving their jobs–or the profession entirely–just a few short years after entering clinical practice.
An overwhelming body of research and years of professional survey data tell you exactly why that is: chronic, intentional understaffing in every hospital and facility, a pandemic of unaddressed violence against nurses, the trauma of working during the Covid-19 pandemic, rigid, brutal schedules–the list is long, but the solutions are numerous and easy enough to implement.
But they cost money. A lot of money.
So instead of addressing the root causes that make direct care nursing so unbearable, hospital executives and administrators are instead turning to Silicon Valley. A group that is always ready to overpromise and underdeliver, as long as their investors get filthy rich in the process.
“I very much worry that we’re going to experience the same issue with healthcare, particularly for healthcare in rural and underserved areas. These new gig work platforms are saying, ‘Who if not us is going to solve the nursing shortage?’ Because we cannot possibly imagine funding appropriate staff levels and fixing issues like flexibility that nurses have been asking for for decades,” Dr. Wells says.
“Because what we have today is not actually a nursing labor shortage, it’s a staff retention crisis. We need to fix the scheduling to give workers more control over their schedules and careers.
Innovation vs. Workers’ Rights: A False Dilemma
Silicon Valley executives claim that their gig work platforms are the solution to nurse staffing issues in the US today. Now, as when Uber was founded in 2009, they claim that their solutions offer the best deal for both hospitals and nurses, and that workers’ rights are a small price to pay for innovation.
But the evidence is clear: nursing gig platforms are deeply exploitative and are poised to drive down nursing wages, weaken worker protections, and make dangerous, miserable work environments even worse if they succeed in carving out the regulatory exceptions they are pushing for.
Dr. Wells says, “All of the data is not in, but it seems like the push to get private equity into US healthcare and anti-worker gig platforms like these are an overlapping part of a broader push to corporatize medicine.”
Dr. Wells says that Uber’s rise was a cautionary tale, and we must heed it:
We have to push back hard and demand answers like, why can’t these hospitals and facilities pay their workers a living wage? Why can’t they provide a set number of hours? Why can’t nurses have more control over their schedules? What are the conditions that must be in place so these hospitals and nursing homes don’t turn to Silicon Valley?
Those answers are crucial because they form the story we tell about why healthcare is the way it is and what we should do about it.
Meg Lambrych, RN
WriterMeg Lambrych is a registered nurse, writer, and nursing advocate from Upstate New York.
After leaving clinical care due to burnout, she dedicated her life to covering issues in healthcare, nursing, and health in the digital space. She reports on nursing culture, policy, and history and interviews nursing innovators and leaders shaping the profession and challenging the status quo.