As AI nurses reshape hospital care, human nurses are pushing back | Hacker News Reader

As AI nurses reshape hospital care, human nurses are pushing back

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29 pointsBostonian11 comments

I've yet to see any AI-based customer support bring anything to the table other than immense frustration over being unable to get through to a human being. Their widespread adoption is purely based on greed and shady business practices, banking on the customer giving up before any (costly) human intervention has taken place. I'd rather not see healthcare go down the same path.

I don't want to chat with an AI when I need help as a customer. I want to ask a question, perhaps sift through a few links that might contain the answer, and if they don't, directly speak to a human being.

From the same industry that brought you automation that deletes your account with no explanation and no appeal until/unless you can get a post about it to go viral: all of your health care.

I date a nurse, I think nursing might give AI an existential crisis.

Jokes aside, nursing is so incredibly innately about human to human care, this is really just more hamfistig something where it doesn’t belong.

I would think the health care system really needs something like this though to avoid disaster.

The worst thing I have read about nursing is someone online saying the lucky people were the ones who failed out of their nursing program.

It seems like we are in denial with amount of care aging boomers are going to need and I don't think it is job you can just throw money at. I just can't imagine what long term care facilities are going to look like in 10 years.

When you have great nurses and staff then AI will definitely come in last. Unfortunately there are so many instances of poor staffing at both hospitals as well as in care/old homes where an impartial AI might just be light years ahead.

Nurses do a lot of different jobs. AI can't add much to direct hands-on patient care. But many nurses work desk jobs doing things like chart review, case management, and patient outreach. There is huge potential to automate that work.

They don't seem like they're doing anything medical related except charging a premium. It's just a generic secretarial bot making and taking administrative phone calls. The horrible chat bots on the website have infected the phones! But I have to wonder why this is even an AI thing, you could do waaaaay better than $9/hr/"seat" spread over lots of customers with normal call-centers that are already used in hospitals and doctor's offices.

The "here's the hourly rate for a nurse vs. what we charge" sounds like a genuinely naive read in the same genre as "if we capture two percent of this market…" slide deck. Hospitals who don't already have the call center are already using much cheaper admin staff compared to nurse rates.

I also can't imagine what patient is going to actually accept a call with an AI nurse. They're all the same models underneath, you might as well just ask ChatGPT your medical question directly for 1¢. The risk to hospitals handing out bad advice via AI means the model you talk to will be so shackled as to be useless.

Hippocratic AI is doing medical work. They contact patients to confirm proper preparation for medical procedures and then follow up afterwards. It's not just call center administrative stuff. And it's not a generic voice chat service for answering random medical questions. Whether patients will accept it remains to be seen, although they may not really have a choice.

Sorry, are you suggesting that a call center, including facilities, electronics, utilities and services, managerial and other operations expenses, are being provided for $9 per person per hour?

Yep, my partner used to work for one in college. At any given moment she was the secretarial staff for 100's of different businesses, most of them doctor's offices. She would take a call and her screen would tell her what business she was pretending to be and the script she should use. The thing that makes it work is calls to any particular business are few and sporadic and that the value is having someone available to answer.

It was a very slick, efficient, and according to her soul crushing place.

The system (AI nurses) work for the simple reason of it sames the individual time experienced. Particularly, the individual retains thier time where it was previously wasted

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