The AI Now Institute has published Uber for Nursing Part II, a report documenting a coordinated effort by gig nursing platforms to carve themselves out of state healthcare staffing regulations. The report, authored by Katie J. Wells, Maya Pinto, and Funda Ustek Spilda, finds that since 2022, lawmakers in at least 17 states have introduced bills recognizing gig nursing platforms as a different type of entity from healthcare staffing agencies.
According to the report, those 17 states are California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, and Wisconsin. In an additional 8 states, policymakers have already carved platform work out of certain state laws. Five platforms — CareRev, Clipboard Health, KARE Technologies, Nursa, and ShiftKey — have lobbied for such bills across multiple states, which the report’s authors describe as evidence of a coordinated strategic priority.
The platforms’ argument, as described in the report, is that their reliance on algorithmic management technologies makes their business model sufficiently novel to fall outside existing legal frameworks designed for conventional healthcare staffing agencies. The report draws a direct parallel to Uber’s earlier strategy: Uber argued it was not a transportation company but a technology platform, which allowed it, according to the authors, to avoid responsibility for passenger safety, minimum wages, and social insurance contributions in dozens of states.
“Much like Uber once cast taxi services as outdated, gig nursing platforms depict healthcare staffing agencies as obsolete and antiquated,” the report states.
The report notes that nearly 15 percent of US employment is currently in the health- and social-assistance sector, citing a March 2026 New York Times report, and describes healthcare as one of the few consistently growing employment areas in the US economy.
Researchers document that the platforms use AI-driven pricing, algorithmic scheduling, performance surveillance, and contractor classifications that effectively shift risk onto individual nurses. The report argues these arrangements weaken labor protections for an entire profession while also limiting public oversight of patient care.
The authors specifically warn that the rise of gig nursing platforms signals a broader adoption of AI in healthcare — covering areas from patient intake and bed planning to treatment prompting and insurance coding — in spaces that fall outside regulatory scrutiny applied to clinical AI systems by the FDA. “Some uses of AI simply don’t get the kind of scrutiny that clinical AI systems receive from the FDA: They fall in a regulatory gap,” the report states.
The report offers New York as a counterexample: the state passed legislation requiring gig nursing platforms to comply with healthcare staffing agency rules, including annual registration, quarterly reporting, and a prohibition on independent-contractor classification. Following that legislation, Clipboard Health, Nursa, and Kare ceased operating in the state. The report also provides a case study of Wisconsin’s legislative debates over platform classification.
The authors argue the question is not whether existing healthcare staffing regulation is adequate, but whether overhauling that regulation to accommodate gig nursing platforms — without addressing potential harms to workers and patients — carries risks that policymakers have not fully weighed.
The full report is available for download from AI Now Institute. A companion press release was issued alongside the publication, with coverage also appearing in The Guardian.