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- Hacker News
- 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 IPOsby an0malous
- 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 formsby firasd
- unrelated, but post's photo - the building - reminds me a cat faceby svitlak
- 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.
- 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.
by jdw64 - > “I’ve got four bottles of something that I take twice a week sitting here,” Callaghan said.
Profits are up! A smashing success!
by gtowey - Seems like the insurance company should be going after Kinneys for submitting so many bogus refill claims so often on drugs. :Dby kotaKat
- 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.by trollbridge
- 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?
by sghiassy - There are pill counter machines! it's a solved problem for sure.
- 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.
by AussieWog93 - Well, in many countries, pharmacies just dispense prepackaged packs and bottles. No counting involved.by StephenAmar
- 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).by a2tech
- 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.by trollbridge
- I think that’s the idea behind those centralized pharmacies like Amazon health. Easier than putting a pill dispensing assembly line in every CVS.by DriverDaily
- 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.
by estearum - 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.
- 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?
by Avicebron - Just another example of using AI as the solution when the real solution is obvious and here.
- Because corporates operate on a religion with forever changing principles with trends and speaking against the vogue trend is taboo.by asdf88990
- > 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.
by kotaKat - But then number would go down... number can't go down!by munk-a
- 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!
by AussieWog93 - 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.
by toomuchtodo - >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.
by matteoraso - Eh, I was kind of expecting that to be the rest of the title when I clicked on it.by rationalist
- Unable to titlemax due to HN maxtitle rules.by dqv