Healthcare AI won't take jobs – it'll make nursing easier, says process automation founder Companies are sticking AI everywhere they can right now - including injecting it into frontline healthcare. The benefits of healthcare AI are still up for debate, but Dan Parsons, cofounder and chief product officer at process automation firm Thoughtful, believes healthcare is the perfect place to start trialing new uses of the …
> Anything that can drive and add more capacity into our healthcare system, I think ultimately is gonna result in a better patient experience."
The big but here is that this is the NHS we are talking about. An organisation of 1.4 million individuals that has never successfully implemented any major IT project
And the common solution to staff/skill shortages is increase training, remuneration and working environment/life balance.
Even the furriner Nurses - against policy scraped from the rest of the 3rd world - are leaving in droves because the NHS has been wrecked - from a pretty good place at May 2010 - by the Tory Government.
My wife is a nurse and she says that the biggest problem (of the many that exist) with the overstaffing situation is that patients don't get the time and reassurance that they need when they're generally in the most stressful times of their lives. Many places have turned into conveyor belts and the soft side of nursing (which is very large part of their valuable work) is the first thing to go. Having stressed patients has a big impact on their health outcomes
I was lucky enough to get a hernia operation recently (my first time having any kind of serious hospital treatment) that was made very tolerable by the time and patience of the nursing staff. The fact that I was calm and reasonable helped them out substantially as well I am sure.
*If* AI could help with this side of things (and that is a *huge* but), then I'm all for it, but people need contact with other people. We need each other.
Quite. AI stands for removing the human wage bill.
In the 80s privatisation was focussed on 'efficiencies', meaning getting everyone to do more with the same, and removing protections to allow wages to be reduced over time. Thus the wage bill (which in many service industries is a large fraction) was reduced and profits increased to 'enable' CEO salaries to increase. Job done.
Now that has been pushed so far and wages have been suppressed so much that many folks can't even afford to live on them, and need state top-ups just to survive. So a new avenue is required. Hello AI. Only if you are in a niche area can you command a significant salary. But as technology moves so quickly if you don't keep looking for where the niche is moving to next even those who were so lucky will be chewed up and spit out.
I've no idea what the answer is, but I was thing about UBI again recently -- maybe the political pressure for that will increase until governments force large corporations to top slice some of their earnings help pay for it? Although, to be fair, looking backwards, they asked a Mr Ford how would anyone be able to afford his new fangled motor cars as he was increasing unemployment in horse-related jobs. And even I can afford one of these things today! So who knows?
I do know one thing: CEOs will never be poor.
"maybe the political pressure for that will increase until governments force large corporations to top slice some of their earnings help pay for it?"
Not if the big tech players get the governments and society so far to push AI into everything that they can't run government and society any more without using big techs complicated AI. Then government nor society is in any position to make such demands. Then they can keep paying extortionate fees to big tech while seeing big tech not only paying zero net taxes but getting a massive subsidy stream because "we" need to keep a competitive advantage against our adversities and competing countries. Big tech already is very good at paying very few taxes. The semiconductor industry and parts of the supply chain already see tens of billions a year subsidy just to produce in the own country and part of that is because we "need" that tech for AI. So...
> to replace nurses
In the not too distant past, an elderly relative was admitted to hospital.
The admission was routine, not an emergency.
On arrive (I accompanied them) a "nurse" on the front desk took the doctor's letter and then asked for all sorts of personal information: name, address, medications, etc.
When they were sent to a ward to await treatment, another individual sat down with them and proceeded to fill in another paper form, requiring most of the same information.
A day later, before the treatment began ... can you guess the next bit? Yes: a third nurse replicated the actions of the previous two.
This all took place in a major London hospital. With three fully trained medical staff performing menial administrative tasks - and for two of them, wasting that time on repeating what had been done before (and that should have already been on a computer from the original GP's referral)
If AI can eliminate this waste of valuable and scarce medics' time, then I am all for it. However, I suspect that instead, the same tasks will continue to be performed by those with nursing degrees, but this time taking twice as long as they try to navigate badly designed and poorly implemented "islands" of data input, none of which talk to any others.
@Pete 2
A downvote! - May be from a NHS Management Consultant lurking here
Going from personal experience of when friends and family have been in hospital, you have to have your wits about you - medication and documentation errors having to be pointed out. What happens with patients who are none the wiser about these things
Then outsourcing could have been helping for the last couple decades. The AI is obviously not going to be replacing saline bags and drawing blood, its role would have to be talking only like responding to a call button to find out what the patient needs, taking lunch orders, doing regular check-ins to see if there are any changes in the patient's reported level of pain, and so forth.
That could have been done by nurses in India getting paid a fraction of what they do here for some time now. Maybe HIPAA is the reason, but I suspect the healthcare industry could have lobbied for an exception if they thought this was a worthwhile plan.
If someone an Indian call center isn't do the job today, I don't see a viable way for AI to be doing it tomorrow. That's true whether it is health care or any other business. If a disembodied computer voice is expected to do it tomorrow, a person in India or Costa Rica should be able to do it today and for a while now.
In the USA they have the problem of private equity moving in to buy up groups of hospitals to establish a local/regional monopoly, extract loads of cash by running them down while running up (hospital) debts, and then when it all falls apart demand more money from the local/regional government to keep things going.*
Using AI to replace staff fits this model very well - pocket the short-term savings and then charge the taxpayer to fix the ensuing problems. Seems to be the standard playbook nowadays.
* ( In the UK we have a similar thing starting, currently with groups of GP practices )
...because its happened before. The machine will replace the 'skill' in 'skilled labor' just leaving the 'labor'. You can't really take the human element out of nursing, the patients aren't suitable candidates for self-serve (although AI might stop them become patients in the first place) so you'll just end up with a lot of unskilled or semi-skilled people along with enough (semi-skilled or unskilled) management to police their attendance and behavior.
This is already a reality in fields like fast food and retail. In theory you could get rid of the humans entirely but you need a minimum number to keep 'shrinkage' under control.
I'm nearing retirement. In my earlier days I enjoyed volunteering in a hospital. I would like to volunteer in retirement, but I simply cannot bring myself to volunteer my time and volunteered wages so that the CEOs of said hospital and health care industry can increase their "compensation". CEO - "I personally got more people to volunteer, saving us costs. Therefore my compensation must be increased exponentially. That and all those denied services and procedures. I should get more now I can utilize AI to deny more without doing it myself. Because I can."
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