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Comment by dwd | Hacker News Reader

This was the telling statement of the whole article.

"Previously, she sorted the patient records before clinic, drafted letters to patients, prepped routine prescriptions—all tasks that lightened the doctors’ load. None of this was possible anymore. The doctors had to do it all themselves."

This is a huge fail and is not just a problem in medical - though the consequences are more serious and will result in patient deaths because doctors are spending more time on paperwork than diagnosing and treating patients.

There was a recent article posted to HN on research going back decades highlighting this issue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157885

View on HN

That's a bad trend you see everywhere. Admin assistant positions are being reduced and now the specialists have to do everything themselves.

In my company we used to have somebody who made all travel arrangements but now we have to do it ourselves which is a major pain and takes a lot of time if you use the system only once a year.

A term for this is "Shadow Work," unpaid labor in the form of self service.

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

I guess this is in line with a lot of people having to work from home in the evening or weekend because they get nothing done during the regular working hours due to meetings a other stuff.

Thanks for the reference.

As we develop systems that take software developers out of the loop because it seemed a cool idea to work on, we'll only have ourselves to blame.

It's short sighted cost cutting. An assistant/admin position is easy to justify for the chopping block, it's removal reduces headcount and the increased load on the specialists is not seen directly on the balance sheet for a while.

It also reduces organizational liability, which produces the usual externality. <sarcasm> Why does the assistant have a need to know about patient X's medical issue? They shouldn't be able to see that data! Only the Dr. should see it! </sarcasm>

On the other hand most people who write the software don't have assistants and are also expected to do all their arrangements themselves. It is even culture in software development circles that one should be self sufficient. For instance that created terms like RTFM (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM).

So for them it's quite likely hard to imagine that other people might have assistants to do things for them.

You can bet, though, that the C-execs and maybe one or two levels below them still have assistants and are not booking their own travel.

Yeap. A relatively lower paid person should be able to help reduce the workload of the higher paid person. Makes good business sense.

Welcome to rigid software not built for adaptability.

"Welcome to rigid software not built for adaptability. "

It's not the software it's the organization who cuts admin positions for short term gain. Instead of assistants who help you with that work you have a ton of VPs for diversity and whatever where nobody knows what they are actually doing.

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