A pharmacy chain in Vermont implemented AI for efficiency | Hacker News Reader

A pharmacy chain in Vermont implemented AI for efficiency

vtdigger.org

40 pointsomerhj52 comments

>A pharmacy chain in Vermont implemented AI for efficiency. It’s led to delays, incorrect information and privacy concerns.

You should post the entire title.

Unable to titlemax due to HN maxtitle rules.

I don't post often or ever so don't remember, you can't change the title to be more reflective of what it is?

A shorter version may be

> A Vermont pharmacy chain's AI implementation led to delays, incorrect information and privacy concerns.

You can try, but then a different group of people might come around and say it's editorializing.

That's 102 characters, HN's limit is 80.

Vermont pharmacy AI rollout leads to delays, misinformation and privacy concerns

(Exactly 80 characters)

Or with the Oxford Comma:

Vermont pharmacy AI rollout brings delays, misinformation, and privacy concerns

(79 characters)

I think in this case - where an editorialized title is better representative of the article, but the published title is too long - it’s usually left to someone like you to give a suggestion, publicly, which is then seen by @dang or their kith, who can then actually make spot adjustments. I personally approve of your editorialization, but that’s worth naught but a canker in a hedge

Upvote to you if you understand the obsolete rationale why it’s 80.

Presumably to avoid having to line wrap for all the lynx users connecting to HN using DEC VT100 terminals.

Lets just break the lynx users for once, and see who complains. Change it to 81. Small enough to be invisible to most users, but when it breaks, someone will come up and shout. Better than going to 100, 132, 140 or 280.

Why 80 characters? Are they storing them on punch cards?

Most of Dang's day is spent shuttling HN titles into the archives in a salt mine in Nevada in between moderation.

Eh, I was kind of expecting that to be the rest of the title when I clicked on it.

It seems like the article's unspoken consensus is if they hired people (ideally local) and paid them a living wage it would go back to working well enough like it did before they attempted the bot.

I wonder why no one brought that up as a solution?

Because corporates operate on a religion with forever changing principles with trends and speaking against the vogue trend is taboo.

AI driven individual incentives for decision makers. Comp goes up for showing off AI, not hiring people.

Lots of “thought leaders” who push the solution but will be gone for the consequences. Next folks (usually those who remain) clean up the mess to no fanfare.

>Comp goes up for showing off AI, not hiring people.

That's funny because a few years ago it was the reverse. people were saying how big tech was bloated, caused by managers that felt their clout was proportional to how many people were under them.

You get what you measure. Both can be wildly irrational depending on incentives and target outcomes.

Would an AI solution have been in place in this context if testing revealed this outcome we’ve arrived at and a data driven decision was made to hire instead? Or was no testing done and we’re testing in prod? Sure looks like testing in prod or simply ignoring metrics specific to a quality customer experience. Like investigating a crash site, we have to ask what series of events and decisions have led us to this incident.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root-cause_analysis

Yes, then the irrational incentives changed to different irrational incentives.

Just another example of using AI as the solution when the real solution is obvious and here.

But then number would go down... number can't go down!

I am wary of stories like this, since they seem to appeal to what people want to be true rather than what is necessarily happening.

There are a lot of businesses quietly and conservatively implementing AI and seeing real results - it's just the crazy Jerry Springer blowups you hear about!

Do you have examples of customer facing real results you could share?

Directly customer facing is a tough one, since a lot of the time chatbots are used to just fob off customers that eat up a lot of time (old people complaining etc).

I think the best experience I've had is when companies offer an MCP server that lets me get up and going with their product very quickly. Sequenzy is one such example I tried, very AI-first and works well with Codex.

If you're talking about stuff that isn't customer facing, there's all kinds of tasks that can and have been automated.

As a simple example, I run a retro games business and we've vibecoded up various controller/cartridge testing apps that have dropped the time it takes to test a box of product by around 50%. I'm planning to spin up a few Hermes agents soon to watch the prices of things and suggest improvements to our listings (e.g. noticing we haven't soldas many copies of Super Mario 64 as we should, and checking our keywords/pricing).

Obviously puts in big work with SaaS and stuff too.

EDIT: actually, Shopify's built-in agent works really well and is directly customer facing. It's a smart model (I think either a Kimi or Qwen as a base) that seems to have been fine tuned on their product itself.

You can ask it stuff like "what products have seen a decrease in sales" or "what is the value of my next payout" and it just answers them.

Before you had to manually write DB queries for this stuff, or more realistically just ignore it.

MCP is just API, and we have been there already and we know what happens: Businesses realise they can’t extract maximal value if they don’t own the interface so they recant the API.

Yes, but that only some businesses do that flys in the face of the breathless, borderline psychotic boosterism a lot of us tend to hear quite a lot of, that AI is gojng to revolutionize everything.

> There are a lot of businesses quietly and conservatively implementing AI and seeing real results

Any example of companies who reported a positive ROI thanks to AI?

https://www.promptthatforyou.com/?prompt=Any%20example%20of%...

Companies don't advertise their wins (the real results), what they advertise is just as or more offensive but not a win (not really real results), but the outraged Jerry Springer crowd with their hair on fire wants drama. Media is literally a multi dollar business these days, they'd do anything to boost their stocks further, so they provide that drama. Best to ignore all of that and focus on what is hidden from view and therefore real and serious.

> I wonder why no one brought that up as a solution?

Ooh! Ooh! I'm a local! I've used Kinney Drugs before.

They literally just can't find the work in the middle of nowhere (on top of not paying living wages). This region is a vast desert and we've lost every other major pharmacy.

"Living wage" up here is also kinda tricky because supposedly people seem to live just fine on minimum wage up here (provided you somehow had good enough credit to get housing in the first place). Things are /generally/ cheap, but there's still an unspoken "the boomers are just fine because they already own their house" up here.

We can't support a Walgreens, we can't support a CVS, we can barely support Walmart pharmacies. All you have for a choice up here is Kinney Drugs or Walmart Pharmacy.

And on top of that, as a former Kinney customer (pre-Burt): they really didn't do a good job in the first place. They suck.

I disagree that "AI" is the major issue on top of Kinney's problems, they've also recently transitioned to a "centralized filling" system in prior months that has caused quite frankly the largest amounts of frustration among customers. They continually fail to fill prescriptions that come into the local pharmacies, instead sending them out to central fill, and every time you show up at the pharmacy it's a "come back tomorrow" because it didn't come on the truck. At this point I don't even back down from that like the rest of the elderly customers, I perk up, tell them it's bullshit, they have stock, and suddenly the teenager punches a few buttons and go "we can have it ready in 20 minutes sir".

But yes, the Burt IVR bullshit is also equally bad and they really keep peddling it in the stores. I've wanted to punch the stupid cardboard standee in the face a couple times.

Honest question, why aren’t pills dispensed by machines?

I get that a pharmacist should review the prescription. And let’s say you even want employee-customer interaction; which is great.

But dispensing X pills from one bottle to another bottle is a solved problem right?

Machines cost a ton of money and need to be maintained?

As those two variables change, I'm sure they will replace the dispensing function for pharmacists. In fact this already does happen at a lot of pharmacies these days. Machines put the pills in bottles, then a pharmacist hands the bottle to you.

There are pill counter machines! it's a solved problem for sure.

They are in large setups. Including mail order and bulk dispensing places (like Walmart pharmacy—most pills are dispensed at central locations and delivered to the store prepackaged).

I think that’s the idea behind those centralized pharmacies like Amazon health. Easier than putting a pill dispensing assembly line in every CVS.

Well, in many countries, pharmacies just dispense prepackaged packs and bottles. No counting involved.

Who packages them?

Automated machines in pharma factories.

That doesn’t make sense if someone walks in off the street for a prescription you’re not going to get factory package medicine.

I could imagine a machine like this would cost something on the order of $100k, require ongoing maintenance and wouldn't really solve any problems/bottlenecks at your typical local pharmacy.

It's not like you could replace the pharmacist with a machine.

Coin machines are really solid at accepting money. I feel like it’s a solved problem.

Edit: I’m dumb, the order of operations is backwards. You’re right, it’ll never be solved.

A pharmacy tech actually counts the pills if they move them from Bottle A to Bottle B, it is not particularly time consuming, and it isn't a particularly skilled position. Starts at $14 an hour around me and tops out around $23.

Because you can't hold a machine accountable, and if a pharmacist has to review the prescription anyway, the cost savings for just the dispensing part wouldn't be there considering the machines wouldn't be cheap.

I needed an emergency prescription the other night and arrived at the pharmacy three minutes before closing time. The pharmacist was able to verify my prescription, dispense the pills, check their work, and complete my transaction with a minute to spare. It would take a very long time to pay off a machine that handled just the dispensing part.

Impressive: they managed to use LLMs to recreate the CVS pharmacy experience, where you get random phone calls from random pharmacies offering to refill a prescription you don't need refilled, or better yet, they just call you to tell you it's already refilled.

> “I’ve got four bottles of something that I take twice a week sitting here,” Callaghan said.

Profits are up! A smashing success!

Seems like the insurance company should be going after Kinneys for submitting so many bogus refill claims so often on drugs. :D

What I've noticed is that AI excels at tasks that are self-contained within a specific logical framework, like coding, writing, and mathematics. But conversation isn't self-contained and requires too much contextual information, which is why AI chatbots and counselors don't seem to perform well.

Ironically, coding and mathematics are about simplifying the complexity of the world and reducing it to logical procedures. That's exactly where AI performs well. But in any profession that involves friction with the real world, current AI still seems to fall short.

Let me predict how Kinney management is going to react to this fiasco: They're going to call it a PR problem and say they haven't done a good enough job of selling the benefits to the customers. So they'll double down and tell the customers they're holding it wrong.

That will of course just piss off the customers more.

The right solution which will restore customer trust is to rip out all the AI shit, call it a failed experiment, and go back to the old system. They'll never do that because then the VP who thought up this garbage won't get his bonus.

This assumes a ton of HIPAA data doesn't get sent up to some cloud and then breached. If that happens, people will start going to prison. HIPAA enforcement does not fuck around. Or at least it didn't before AI and Elon took over everything.

unrelated, but post's photo - the building - reminds me a cat face

A paradoxical situation here is that they are probably not using the frontier models because compliance and other stamps of approval but this packaged approved AI is making silly mistakes in reading forms

When is this madness going to stop? We need to do better as a society.

When the VCs finish their rug pull, i.e. the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs

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