Question about my hospital's new AI scheduling system

So my work rolled out this new AI tool to make the nurse schedule about six months ago. It was supposed to be fair and stop favoritism. But last week, it gave me three night shifts in a row right after I'd requested a single day off for a family thing. The system flagged my request as 'low priority' because too many people were off that weekend. The thing is, the AI doesn't know I covered two holidays for coworkers last quarter. It just sees numbers. Everyone says this tech is unbiased, but I think it's biased against people who actually help out. It only looks at the data it's fed, not the human stuff. Has anyone else had a scheduling algorithm mess up because it couldn't understand context?

3 comments

3 Comments

victorb1728d ago

Mark, did your manager ever actually admit the system had a blind spot or just blamed the AI?

sarah5311mo ago

My friend Mark at a different hospital had the exact same problem. Their new system gave him the worst weekend shifts for a month straight because he had low seniority in the data. It totally ignored that he always takes the extra admits when the floor is swamped. He tried talking to the manager, but they just pointed at the computer and said the algorithm was fair. He felt completely punished for being a team player. It makes you wonder who these systems are really built for.

the_tessa1mo ago

Ugh, does this ever hit home. My old job used one of those "fair" systems and it was a total joke. I got stuck closing every Friday for two months because the data said I had "low weekend shift density" or whatever. Never mind that I was the one always staying late to help finish the count. The computer just can't see that stuff, so people who go the extra mile get burned. It feels like the system is built for robots, not for actual teams.