mhoyeI heard a confession from a friend the other day who's working on ML in health care who's leaving that field as soon as he can because as best as he and his team can measure, the most important thing ML analytics can bring to hospitals is the mathematical certainty they should have taken the money they spent on ML analytics and hired nurses instead.
Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉@mhoye fwiw, they're having a hard time hiring enough nurses, and lab techs, and everything else. My aunt is a semi-retired critical care nurse and she keeps going back to work because they are desperate and paying well. COVID, and the way it was handled (or, more accurately, not handled) really did a number on the profession. I'm not saying ML helps with that problem, just that "hire more nurses" is actually a hard problem.
freeform@swelljoe @mhoye but also it seems like not so hard a problem if it consists in compensating care work fairly (above the current surges too), especially if scrap the nonsense of ML expenses and actually acknowledging a honorable profession - first by compensation (bc capitalism, ugh) then by actually caring for care (well.. revolution), so yes I guess a hard problem but also no
@freeformtragedy @mhoye I believe it's kinda like the problem with skilled trades being incredibly hard to hire for. The pipeline of people going into those fields for the past couple decades has not been large enough to supply for the demand. Partly because everybody in my generation onward was told they had to get a university degree to get a good job and be respected and compensated well. In medical fields, it's exacerbated by the large and aging boomer population needing more care.
@freeformtragedy @mhoye so, yes, paying nurses and other medical caregivers well is a prerequisite, but it takes several years after that change for graduating high school kids to start wanting to go into those fields and for trained workers to start showing up. Some workers who left the field could be brought back in with increased wage offers, and many have, but it's still worse than pre-pandemic. And, of course, our profit-motivated healthcare system doesn't want to pay workers more.