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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

#161
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.

If a human’s performance for 40 plus hours a week can be reduced to a performance score, that too in a field like healthcare, that alone feels weird. Sure there needs to be some way to reward people/evaluate their work etc, but I dunno if management by metrics is the best way, especially when those numbers are calculated by an algorithm.

Where has all the empathy gone? And common sense? :(

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

#162

They want you to blame "AI" like Claude jumped up and decided to start hassling nurses, not individuals in management

If you read the quotes from the union, they blame the management, and they cite workplace survillience as one issue, wich is happened to be a machine learning tool. So, of course the article talks about AI, because thats the trendy buzzword.

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

#163
post #89
post #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 ag…

90% of the time when I call a call center I need a human to fix an organisational bug - e.g. faulty billing or some other kind of mixup. AI cannot help with this. If it's to do something normal you could do through the website there was no need for AI - a website or app suffices - provided it isnt terrible. Capital definitely thinks it can save costs here but capital is getting increasingly delusional these days.

The HN crowd is not the usual demographic for call centers. Im willing to generalize a vast majority of callers can find the info they are looking for if they tried a little

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

#164

I RFTA and the majority of the complaints are about call center metrics and the pressure to ration care. These are real concerns about misuse of metrics, but not AI. The AI empathy thing was a 2024 pilot that was discontinued. FWIW my wife works for Kaiser and finds a lot of value in the the medical LLM tools available to her. She tells me being able to do live translation, summarize notes, and quickly get comprehens…

Cardiac events from Apple Watches is not “AI” though

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

#165
post #12
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.

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.

> You can't rely on asking the customer

It’s not even been five years of AI, and we’ve already arrived at the point where the human is wrong and the AI is right.

Mind you this is in an area where the benchmark is the opinion of the human ! So if the customer is saying you’ve shown enough empathy but AI says you haven’t, then you take opinion of the AI?

Soon we’re going to have a situation where the patient is breathing, but the AI says he’s dead.

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

#166

They want you to blame "AI" like Claude jumped up and decided to start hassling nurses, not individuals in management

If you read the quotes from the union, they blame the management, and they cite workplace survillience as one issue, wich is happened to be a machine learning tool. So, of course the article talks about AI, because thats the trendy buzzword.

They already did a trial which used the trendy buzzword to surveil the nurses. The nurses want to implement controls on that trendy buzzword before it is further misused by management to cause harm to patients (by way of making the nurses focus on meeting some arbitrary performance metric rather than focusing on patient care).

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

#167
The nurses at our local rural hospital are tagged and tracked wherever they go on the hospital campus. Time spent in one spot is part of their review.

I wondered why they zip in and out of the rooms, when just a few years ago they would spend fifteen to twenty minutes in each room. The patient load hadn't grown. The number of nurses has gone up, not down.

So I'm blaming the stupid metric on their evaluations for a worse standard of care.

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

#168
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you just say the point you're trying to make about nonprofits directly?

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not talking about Kaiser. I’m talking about companies like UnitedHealth Group Incorporated who own UnitedHealthcare the insurance company and Optum the healthcare provider. > That being said, insurers do compete on price so they lose customers if they charge more than other insurers. Yeah but that’s a second order effect. Most companies are incentivized to cut costs because they will directly realize the profit.…

Right, but the article was about Kaiser and I was talking about the thing the article was about.

Sure, but the person you replied to said

>Maybe healthcare shouldn’t be primarily for profit?

Which is a far larger topic than what the article was about.

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By a knowledgeable/skilled person who listens to the call. (Which the AI solution provides). Can you point me to the information you evidently have about which models Kaiser is using? All I can find is that they're using innovaccer, which can use any of anthropic, openai, and meta models on AWS or azure. Even their published papers don't seem to specify a particular model or capability level, just "AI". For all we kn…

> For all we know We don't know, so let's not pre-judge.

Or we listen to the experts who are frustrated with the system? They see the effects even if they don't know the AI model causing it.
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