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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

#71
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eva…

Are these nurses currently represented by a union?

Yes.

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

#73
post #3

If 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.

sadly, this is happening more as medicine and healthcare become more and more corporate. Seeing this as hospitals all get acquired into these mega health systems (ostensibly to fight the now merged mega health insurance companies), that then like to throw their weight around.

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

#74
It sucks because AI reduces call center costs in many toil tasks very effectively, regardless of whether you want to help or dissuade customers - it's just well-suited to the task and it's going to accelerate. It's a win for capital and the technology implementers, even if it's a loser for the call center employees and callers.

Some of the tech is pretty scary. One big vendor's solution [0] can provide not just AI agents but also use AI to snoop on calls in progress, evaluating sentiment from both sides [1], verifying phrases are said - pretty dystopian in theory. From experience, these things tend to go downhill based on the attitude at the top - is the mission to slash costs or take care of customers? A 1000 decisions follow from this one, and like Jira, it can be a useful tool or a prison-like hell.

[0] https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/contac...

[1] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/contact-center/webex-...

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

#76
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.

Not asking the customer because you're afraid they'll tell you they're upset is a good indicator that you should do it more, and fix the issues. You can ask the customer enough times that unreasonable customers or surveys are averaged out. A good question might be "why are you upset?"

Isn’t it a running joke at this point that if you do what customers ask instead of focusing on the highest quality of service you get worse outcomes and the customer is still unhappy?

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

#77

Unpopular opinion: People want to be lazy and hate things that force them to work harder. They will vocally rationalize it. I did it. "I'm more productive work from home." But then I do dishes, take an hour break, paid. Foucault says that when people are observing them, power is placed over them. If you are a worker you should hate this. If you are a customer or owner, you should like this. But I certainly won't be a…

Your anecdote talks about taking breaks and doing dishes, but fails to talk about measures of productivity.

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

#78
post #55

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…

Everyone pushing tools/AI during initial development/investment and building its demand in the cultural discourse always highlights its ability for good. Now, like many tools, the majority of those selling AI to make money off of large enterprise sell its ability to increase productivity, efficiency, compliance. Either to make money or to minimise risk. And so like you say, they just become tools to make these metric…

Certainly, I agree that using AI to dehumanize - generally what companies seem to be doing with it - is super bad. And it's also what is being sold to existing companies right now.

But that same AI could cause those companies to no longer exist.

The AI I'm happy about allows people without much tech knowledge create small apps to do exactly what they want. And, for those that know just a little more, use it to help them extend open source software for their niche use case.

This makes computing more personal and gives back agency to the computer operator.

Mix that with the rise of much more competition in much more custom software, and you'll see that a future can exist, if we want it, where software becomes more personal and humane.

The software vendor will capture less value, though - the margins will be thinner. Instead that value will be captured (in non-money terms) by the end users.

That also means that software companies, unable to capture so much value, must shrink and become more boutique. The software that contributes to our centralized world would lose a lot of power.

That's the future I can see. The only way it doesn't happen is if a cynical narrative wins out and manages to lock it out through regulatory capture so that only licensed operators can use or provide AI. The anti-AI narrative helps the cynics.

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

#80
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you suppose thats why they wrote "principally"?

You're absolutely wrong!

And here is why: I guarantee you that the nurses are working in the "for-profit" units, and also, that still betrays ignorance of what "non-profit" actually means, which is the load-bearing topic of this thread.

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