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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

#111

Post by bluegatty »

inigyou wrote: post #21
neaden wrote: 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.

Power is based on wealth extraction, not merit.

a bit upside down - wealth extraction is a measure of power.

development of power can be based on all sorts of things, it depends on the framework.

a nurse who is utterly incompetent will be fired quickly.

after a certain threshold though, obviously, competition won't be about 'ability' so much - but there are baseline ability and professionalism thresholds.

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

#112

Post by Avicebron »

jbxntuehineoh wrote: post #96
Avicebron wrote: post #2

Obligatory dystopia reminder. It doesn't have to be this way https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

but but but... the line! it has to go up, doesn't it?

Yes brother. This is the way. We pray to the line, only it can shelter us in these dark times of labor revitalization. HODL. May your returns be colossal.

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

#113

Post by lukeschlather »

The article mentions uses of AI but doesn't really give any examples of harm from AI. It does give specific examples where it sounds like Kaiser is optimizing calls to minimize cost rather than improve quality of care. It's also pretty easy to expect that the examples given (treating longer calls as a problem and penalizing nurses for giving more than 3 pieces of advice) reduce the quality of care.

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

#115

Post by derekdahmer »

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 comprehensive answers save her time and help her give better care. Her older patients also frequently come in bringing AI-powered alerts from their apple watches that detected cardiac events.

It's annoying that we use broad terms to describe a set of technologies that in some ways can be problematic and in another ways are very beneficial. We gotta evaluate each of these as they come rather than talk about blanket bans.

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

#117

Post by markdown »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #65
munk-a wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Patients are not customers, or at least I don’t want to live in a world where patients are considered customers. Customers and vendors are usually more of a symmetric relationship: price transparency, alternatives, lack of urgency. These are all characteristics of transactions that healthcare often lacks.

If the hospital is owned by private equity, the owners definitely think of the patients as customers. Doctors and nurses shouldn't, but the owners do.

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

#118

Post by api »

derekdahmer wrote: post #115

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…

“AI” in title gets clicks. So “AI” must be in title.

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

#119

Post by sarchertech »

caturopath wrote: post #103
apercu wrote: post #25

Maybe healthcare shouldn’t be primarily for profit?

I'm not sure the for-profit approach is exactly what's to blame. HMOs like Kaiser are legally forced to spend a certain fraction (80% percent for the worst case, more for large group plans) of their premium revenue on medical services. They can't save and pocket the money like a traditional for-profit enterprise. This doesn't seem like a money-saving measure exactly. The main AIs the article talks about is making sur…

> spend a certain fraction (80% percent

Increasingly health insurance companies and healthcare providers are intertwined. So they may spend 80% on healthcare, but then a big chunk of that could go to the urgent care clinics that they own.

And even if they don’t own the provider, they don’t have much incentive to lower total cost because 20% of a larger number means more total profit.

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

#120

Post by api »

neaden wrote: 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.

That project was cancelled. This is mostly about workplace surveillance.

Most of the replies are large pop subReddit level junk.

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