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A pharmacy chain in Vermont implemented AI for efficiency
- gtowey 2mo ago> “I’ve got four bottles of something that I take twice a week sitting here,” Callaghan said. Profits are up! A smashing success!
- kotaKat 2mo agoSeems like the insurance company should be going after Kinneys for submitting so many bogus refill claims so often on drugs. :D
- matteoraso 2mo ago>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.
- dqv 2mo agoUnable to titlemax due to HN maxtitle rules.
- kshacker 2mo agoI 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.
- dqv 2mo agoYou can try, but then a different group of people might come around and say it's editorializing.
- ivewonyoung 2mo agoThat's 102 characters, HN's limit is 80.
- rationalist 2mo agoVermont 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)
- zxexz 2mo agoI 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
- irishcoffee 2mo agoUpvote to you if you understand the obsolete rationale why it’s 80.
- georgemcbay 2mo agoPresumably to avoid having to line wrap for all the lynx users connecting to HN using DEC VT100 terminals.
- kshacker 2mo agoLets 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.
- timbit42 2mo agoWhy 80 characters? Are they storing them on punch cards?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- rationalist 2mo agoEh, I was kind of expecting that to be the rest of the title when I clicked on it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- sghiassy 2mo agoHonest 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?
- estearum 2mo agoMachines 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.
- calvinmorrison 2mo agoThere are pill counter machines! it's a solved problem for sure.
- a2tech 2mo agoThey 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).
- DriverDaily 2mo agoI think that’s the idea behind those centralized pharmacies like Amazon health. Easier than putting a pill dispensing assembly line in every CVS.
- StephenAmar 2mo agoWell, in many countries, pharmacies just dispense prepackaged packs and bottles. No counting involved.
- dyauspitr 2mo agoWho packages them?
- firasd 2mo agoA 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
- svitlak 2mo agounrelated, but post's photo - the building - reminds me a cat face
- Avicebron 2mo agoIt 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?
- asdf88990 2mo agoBecause corporates operate on a religion with forever changing principles with trends and speaking against the vogue trend is taboo.
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoAI 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.
- gruez 2mo ago>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.
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoYou 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/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root-cause_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root-cause_analysis
- champagnepapi 2mo agoWhen is this madness going to stop? We need to do better as a society.
- an0malous 2mo agoWhen the VCs finish their rug pull, i.e. the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs
- jdw64 2mo agoWhat 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.
- trollbridge 2mo agoImpressive: 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.
- dreamcompiler 2mo agoLet 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.