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The week my hospital's scheduling AI sent three nurses to the same floor twice | AI Job Takeover - Free To Speak

The week my hospital's scheduling AI sent three nurses to the same floor twice

Last month I worked nights at a hospital in Richmond, and the new AI scheduling system had a rough 48 hours. It double-booked three of us on the same cardiac unit, then left the ER short staffed both Tuesday and Wednesday nights. We all showed up, looked at each other, and the charge nurse just laughed and said 'welcome to the future.' The worst part is nobody really knew who to call to fix it, since the vendor's support line only works 9 to 5. Has anyone else seen AI tools fail in ways that put real people in a bad spot, not just annoying but unsafe?

2 comments

2 Comments

sean_green441mo ago

Honestly, I used to think all this AI stuff was just a smart way to save time. I figured the people building it knew what they were doing and it would just sort out the boring parts of a job. But reading this changed my mind. It's one thing when a computer messes up a shopping order, it's a whole other thing when it leaves an ER short staffed and nobody can fix it until Monday morning. That part about the 9 to 5 support line got me good. You can't schedule a broken system to only fall apart during business hours. That's a real failure, and it's scary that the people in charge probably don't see the danger until someone actually gets hurt.

jadej501mo ago

Feels like we're skipping past a lot of context here, @sean_green44. That ER story might be a cherry-picked worst case, not the norm. Plenty of systems have built-in backups or manual overrides that kick in way before Monday, but nobody posts about those. You really think the people running hospitals haven't thought about a weekend failure, or is it more likely the article left those details out to get a reaction?