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An algorithm is clearly a virtual scapegoat. They’ll need to interview those who were involved in coding it. Dig deeper to find out why.

• SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The quoted explanation sounds pretty complete to me. They used "assigned location" to determine who was working with COVID patients, but residents don't have an "assigned location", so they were incorrectly passed over even though they do in practice work with COVID patients. Maybe that doesn't completely exonerate the administrators from blame, because someone should have sanity checked the plan, but it also seems like a very understandable error to make when you're rushing.
  • jrumbut 6y ago
    It's an understandable error only if residents and their safety isn't at the front of your mind. Perhaps if a resident had been closely involved they would have been able to tell the developers that they don't have anything in the location field. It's not like Stanford didn't know a limited supply vaccine was coming several months ago, there was time to figure this stuff out. And it would have been, if it had been a high enough priority.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Not everything can be high priority. Stanford administrators several months ago would have been working on securing adequate supplies and staffing for the expected fall surge; that's a much more important problem, both to the system as a whole and to the residents, than who gets vaccinated today vs. next week.
      • tannedNerd 6y ago
        The article says they realized the error Tuesday and did nothing about it till the residents staged a protest. It very much seems like they were hopping it would blow over.
      • renewiltord 6y ago
        I've got to be honest with you: this thing can totally be solved with a human pass. In fact, give me the list, your employment rolls, and I'll fix this for you for free in a couple of hours at max. Government workers are particularly vulnerable to this sort of failure mode: assuming everything is hard. This is not that hard. It's pretty easy. But big company workers are also usually susceptible to this. They don't get things done very fast so they're used to things taking a long time to do and assume that even trivialities must take a couple of days. But that's why companies like Tesla and SpaceX succeed to these peoples' surprise. They look at these companies and say "They can't do that. This is hard. It takes maybe a half century of engineering." Turns out lots of things, even if they're hard, can be done pretty fast. But not by those who've been damaged by their own slowness not being punished.
        • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
          If you gave Tesla or SpaceX the task of managing a vaccine rollout, they wouldn't see this as a problem to fix, because they wouldn't construct a public, detailed priority list cross-checked for equity across every subgroup. They'd just reach out to the N people that seem best at a quick glance, say "hey come get your vaccine", and repeat as new shipments come in until everyone's vaccinated. That bias towards doing things, rather than going to laborious efforts checking plans against everyone who might be affected, is exactly why they can do things so fast.
  • doctoring 6y ago
    But... why were they rushing? It's not like the vaccine appeared out of thin air on Friday. Its arrival was known for weeks/months. The staff and where they work is known. The error itself is understandable but the conditions leading to it and its propagation are not. The further, unforgivable sin is that the error was brought to their attention internally on Tuesday, the administrators didn't bother to fix it, and then when it became more widely known to the hospital staff Thursday afternoon they still did not act to fix it. And then Friday, suddenly they're in the news, they decide they're going to fix it? Disclosure: Am a physician at Stanford.
  • m3kw9 6y ago
    They had time to build the algo but no time to proof check the selection?
• chaostheory 6y ago
  The people “coding it” are probably following requirements usually set by HR and upper management. Not sure about Stanford hospitals, but in most orgs HR is usually the lead department when it comes to COVID-19 protocols.