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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

#41

Post by munk-a »

lostlogin wrote: post #32
malfist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you can rely on the customers. They're the only ones that can tell you.

> you can rely on the customers. Patient or customer? I even struggle with that, but I guess that’s what people are in a privatised healthcare system.

Most of the folks here on HN are dealing with customer feedback in systems automation in one form or another - it's pretty unavoidable in this age of LLM trendiness. The customers of healthcare (in both private and publicly funded systems) are the patients. So while the term might not be super natural it's an understandable one to use.

Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse

#42

Post by saltcured »

BeetleB wrote: post #14
14 wrote: post #6

I 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.

The AI is a lot cheaper. Kaiser nurses are amongst the highest paid in the nation.

Now let's talk about how AI could replace Kaiser middle management and streamline bureaucracy to preserve more budget for doctors and nurses...

Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse

#43

Post by sscaryterry »

thin_carapace wrote: post #28
inigyou wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power is based on wealth extraction, not merit.

isn't that exactly what a class terrified of the guillotine would want underclasses to believe?

Êtes-vous français?

Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse

#45

Post by doodlebugging »

inigyou wrote: post #23
doodlebugging wrote: post #18

This problem with workplace AI interfering with nurses ability to manage healthcare obligations for their clients is not confined to Kaiser. UHC has also introduced the AI surveillance tools and are using it to do similar things.

Isn't that the insurance company whose CEO was murdered because of the terrible quality of care they delivered?

Yes it is. Somehow that might appear to be incentive to improve quality of care but maybe their corporate culture is a bad fit for quality.

Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse

#46

Post by ButlerianJihad »

arjie wrote: post #44
apercu wrote: post #25

Maybe healthcare shouldn’t be primarily for profit?

Well, I suppose you can rest easy on that count. Kaiser is principally a non-profit.

> principally a non-profit.

I hate to break it to you, but "non-profit" doesn't mean what you literally think it means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente

Also, KPMGs are indeed "for-profit" while Kaiser Permanente as a whole is constituted as a "consortium" of both types.

Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse

#47

Post by guelo »

nojito wrote: post #33
bmitc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kaiser has some of the best healthcare outcomes in the country/world due to their protocols and how good they are in ensuring adherence to them. Where and how is that determined? I.e., any references to back that up? And you can't in one breath say they have the best healthcare but then say their employees' reports of their experience are unreliable.

Not sure if you’re serious but just search the name Kaiser in any research search engine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8032167/ Their secret sauce is their ability to standardize protocols throughout their entire organization.

Study is from 2000-2013, their care has deteriorated significantly since then. I know because I've been a patient the whole time.

Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse

#48

Post by monknomo »

munk-a wrote: post #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.

balls, that's the metric line managers use to figure out who's out of whack

Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse

#49

Post by groby_b »

malfist wrote: post #15
BeetleB wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you employ a few hundred nurses, how exactly would you evaluate how well they show empathy? You can't rely on asking the customer. When they're upset (they often are in these calls), they'll lean towards the negative regardless. I don't know how well these AIs evaluate, but if they're even a little bit good, it makes sense to use it to screen for outliers, then have a human listen to those outliers and judge.

Actually, you can rely on the customers. They're the only ones that can tell you.

But they don't want to, because figuring that out is your job as a supervisor.

If you outsource that work to customers/patients, you'll end up with the car dealership model, where the sales rep begs you to give a 10 on every single question including on the interior design so they don't get fired.

That's the part most of this discussion misses. Supervisors exist for a reason. Congrats on your flat org structure, you fucked up an important feedback channel.

Re: Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse

#50

Post by einpoklum »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #31

What these complaints always boil down to is autonomy and control. The more centralized an organization, the more it relies on metrics to understand and exert control over its employees and customers. People started hating tech right around the time metrics became popular. I don't think it's a coincidence. AI just accelerates the trend. The problem is the misidentification of AI as the issue. As long as we don't unde…

> AI is just a tool

"To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." [1] There is no such thing as "just" a tool.

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[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument

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