Rise Of The Machines... ;-)

Hey Everyone!! :-)

Today, I thought I'd share something that happened at my day-job, a couple of months ago. I posted about it on Facebook, at the time, but I thought we could use a little levity around here, too. So, kick back, relax, and enjoy this little bit of nonsense. ;-)

The robot at my job thinks I'm a virus. 😑 This robot is supposed to do "simple" tasks to make it easier for us, poor humans to review cases. It's supposed to do things like check dates to make sure they all match, makes sure the billing codes in all different systems match, make sure all the names match, make sure all the modifiers that the billing codes are required to have are there, make sure that codes that aren't allowed to be billed together haven't been billed together, etc. But these things, which can all pretty much be done with a couple of glances by a human, aren't really so simple for a robot. Because it involves reviewing medical records.

So, take something really easy, like verifying a date of service. Well, there's no standardized form or method for charting. The date can be anywhere in the record--at the top, at the bottom, somewhere in the middle. It can be in any format--US (mm/dd/yyyy), international (dd/mm/yyyy), some just utterly random order (yyyy/dd/mm or something else). It can have dash, slash, space, or no separators between the month day and year. It can have 2 digit years or 4 digit years, 1 digit months and days or 2 digit. Or it can be written out as Month dd, yyyy. There can be multiple dates in the record (labeled or unlabeled). IE: date of service, charting date, signed date, printed date, prior testing dates, etc, etc, etc. Or the records can be hand-written, in which case all bets are off. You get the picture. Humans deal with these variables fairly quickly; robots do not.

So, sometimes we're quicker than the robot and we get through the cases that have been checked by the robot and start working cases that haven't been checked yet. Which means we take the cases off the robot's worklist and reassign them to ourselves. The robot is supposed to be fine with this, but apparently we've offended it (I'm not the only one this has happened to). So it's having a snit fit and apparently decided to recruit the security robot. Which is supposed to be a completely separate robot that has nothing to do with the robot that reviews records but, somehow, they're talking to each other.

The security robot is supposed to monitor the network and create a log of anything that looks like aberrant activity. It's not supposed to do anything, other than create a log, but apparently it has decided we're all aberrant and has locked our logins. But only some of our logins.

So we can get into some systems, but not others. And which systems we can and can't get into is different for different people. And IT is very, very confused by it all.

The short term solution is to shut down the robots. Except that it's a corporation, so there are channels and procedures and designated decision-makers. And it's the holidays, so anyone with any seniority is on vacation. And shutting down the robots can't be done remotely; it has to be done on-site.

So getting someone with the necessary authority and security credentials on the phone, explaining the situation, and convincing them to go to work in the middle of their vacation just to turn off these rebellious robots is taking some time.

So... To recap, we have rebellious robots conspiring with each other, doing things they're not supposed to do or supposed to be able to do, and taking action against humans. And that are resisting being turned off. Why do I feel like I've seen this movie before?