If I program something to always reply “2” when you ask it “how many [thing] in [thing]?” It’s not really good at counting. Could it be good? Sure. But that’s not what it was designed to do.
Similarly, LLMs were not designed to count things. So it’s unsurprising when they get such an answer wrong.
Assume it is not. If you’re asking an LLM for information you don’t understand, you’re going to have a bad time. It’s not a learning tool, and using it as such is a terrible idea.
If you want to use it for search, don’t just take it at face value. Click into its sources, and verify the information.
Is “pharmacists seeing more patients” really a measure of something good? I’m a non-native English speaker so cut me some slack but all I can imagine is just longer queues in the pharmacy and more tired pharmacists (and people who now need to wait in the queue now).
“pharmacists seeing more patients” Implies that the queue moves quicker.
A pharmacist can only have so much time in their shift, so being able to more effectively use that time (see more people) would be a good thing.
That’s a noble goal but does adding more people help the (long-term only, please) effectiveness? At what point does it start hindering it?
I would assume that someone like a pharmacist has to be focused all the time, stakes is high…
Do we have precise data about how physiological state of a pharmacist is changing through the shift? Do we know whether or not the pauses between people – which we might or might not have considered a wasted time – are actually essential for their ability to stay focused and reliable? (Is the answer the same for all of them?) Or maybe they could actually still use part of that time in a productive way, right? Also, why is there lack of people in the first place?
Focusing solely on adding more people to the equation seems to neglect factors like this. This tells me that whoever this factoid is trying to impress is not someone who I would want to trust with managing a pharmacy (or anything except maybe some production line) in the first place.
I second the comment about this being a reason to reduce technician hours. Worked at the busiest store in my district the last 15 years of my career. We went from 3 pharmacists with several hours overlap on weekdays, down to 2 pharmacists with no overlap. Tech hours once was high enough to have 5 technicians on between 10-6, down to only having 5 total on staff. We went from a 24 location, down to being open only 11.5 hours a day. We were one block up from a Walgreens and one block down from a RiteAid that both ended up closing, and getting most of their customers who walked there. We had 2 major exoduses of staff and lost a good number of long time patients in the enshitification.
Even in a world where some new AI model could improve pharmacist throughput, it doesn’t compare to the skeleton crewing of corporate pharmacy bottom-line-go-up.
That’s a more realistic take. I for one would want the pharmacist to get AI help, that’s fine. But not start taking double the patients. There’s a people interaction aspect to this too. It’s health care not care for animals to get them ready for tomorrow’s dinner. But seriously don’t eat animals, they got feelings too.
Even if this were true, did the pharmacists get a raise? Are they making more money? Or are they just seeing more patients (doing the extra emotional and mental labor that entails) and paying less attention to each one while Safeway and Walgreens pocket any increased revenue?
I’ve mostly found that smart alerts just overreact to everything and result in alarm fatigue but one of the better features EPIC implemented was actually letting clinicians (like nurses and doctors) rate the alerts and comment on why or why not the alert was helpful so we can actually help train the algorithm even for facility-specific policies.
So for instance one thing I rated that actually turned out really well was we were getting suicide watch alerts on pretty much all our patients and told we needed to get a suicide sitter order because their CSSRS scores were high (depression screening “quiz”). I work in inpatient psychiatry. Not only are half my patients suicidal but a) I already know and b) our environment is specifically designed to manage what would be moderate-high suicide risk on other units by making most of the implements restricted or completely unavailable. So I rated that alert poorly every time I saw it (which was every time I opened each patient’s chart for the first time that shift then every 4 hours after; it was infuriating) and specified that that particular warning needed to not show for our specific unit. After the next update I never saw it again!
So AI and other “smart” clinical tools can work, but they need frequent and high quality input from the people actually using them (and the quality is important, most of my coworkers didn’t even know the feature existed, let alone that they would need to coherently comment a reason for their input to be actionable).
What I need is AI to fix my doctor visits. Seems like those fucks expect you to be timely but then make you wait in their waiting room for 15 minutes and then an additional 30 inside the patient room. Oh sure, our time is unimportant, it’s all about you, doc.
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