Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
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Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
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Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
#2Obligatory dystopia reminder. It doesn't have to be this way https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
#3If you think using a machine to evaluate how well a human is showing empathy is a good idea, you probably shouldn't have any position of power.
Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
#4[deleted]
Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
#5> "Nurses fear that having long calls can lead to bad performance reviews"
> A company spokesperson said, "Kaiser Permanente does not use Average Handle Time to assess agent performance"
So uh, average time wasn't raised as a concern, calls beyond a certain threshold was. I wish this semantic discrepancy was better highlighted in the article.
Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
#6I would love to learn the cost of the AI versus how many new workers they could afford to hire and get more calls done. But I assume the end goal will be full replacement of human workers once the AI has had enough time to learn the job.
Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
#7> Nurses are instructed to stick to a script on phone calls and give no more than two to three pieces of advice, Capulong and other nurses said, which means they may sometimes need to decide whether to withhold advice or face a performance evaluation hearing.
> Another nurse speaking on condition of anonymity said “AI did not understand our job and would grade us wrong all the time.”
It's always worth remembering Goodhart's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
In theory AI could usher in the first time in history where one can escape from this trap - because qualitative judgments can be made at scale, from an unbiased and universal baseline. In this situation, for instance, rather than collapsing call transcripts and reports into metrics, it could evaluate whether red flags are encountered in the context of a call, and allow for qualitative guidance on improvement, across a comparative corpus of situations that are themselves chosen qualitatively.
But very few managers are empowered to take this kind of approach; they're evaluated by their ability to report quantitative metrics, and thus they must implement regimes of quantitative metrics. And leadership instructs them to use AI to build that regime more quickly.
If you want to see an "AI native" organization, it's one where leadership actively fights this tendency, and sees managers as product designers who make the end-user experience a beloved and empathy-driven one, as opposed to a gear that turns accountability into a single number on a screen.
Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
#8> "Nurses fear that having long calls can lead to bad performance reviews" > A company spokesperson said, "Kaiser Permanente does not use Average Handle Time to assess agent performance" So uh, average time wasn't raised as a concern, calls beyond a certain threshold was. I wish this semantic discrepancy was better highlighted in the article.
I have some inside information (but not much!)
They claim they do not use average handle time, but it is very common to get called into meetings to discuss why they spent a lot of time on some calls. The nurses get defensive (by definition - they have to justify the time used - it is a defense).
They also do get called into meetings if their average handle time is large.
It may still be true they don't use it for evaluating performance, but they absolutely do utilize it to "coach" the nurses.
Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
#9There's a reason that among Americans, telekinesis and creationism are more mainstream positions than sloptimism.
About 14% of Americans think AI is moving us towards a better world. About 17% are creationists. About 26% believe in Telekinesis.
Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
#10Obligatory dystopia reminder. It doesn't have to be this way https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
But we're all in on making it that way!