Artificial intelligence can enhance home care delivery if implemented the right way

The rise of artificial intelligence has elicited both excitement and concern about how the technology will impact the aged care sector, specifically home care.

The justifiable hesitance to embrace any new technology is widely understood. But like all advances, the best way to harness AI is to understand its potential benefits and risks.

Once we have this understanding, we can outline exactly how to use it and how to mitigate any risks that might eventuate.

Embracing AI without a plan or a framework in place can be a recipe for suboptimal implementation, impacting client care and staff wellbeing.

At Benetas, we’ve done our homework. We’ve taken the time to ensure we know what AI can do and investigate the right technologies for the service we provide.

We implemented the Lookout Way, an AI-powered tool that helps us support our home care clients, improving the way we provide care and ensuring an extra line of support.

And we’ve already seen the benefits.

Modern home care is a very large, multi-faceted machine. It’s not just about the visits and the service provided.

It’s about coordinating the right staff and the right travel activities while being prepared for the changes and complications that life serves up every day.

Harnessing AI’s strengths allows us to continually sift through mountains of data to get our clients the support they need as soon as possible, from health trend monitoring to finding the best fit carer to attend a visit when the client’s care needs shift.

Benetas delivers up to 1,000 care activities each day and can manage around 200 schedule changes within a 24-hour period.

The logistics involved in navigating these daily changes can be complex with countless moving parts.

Every cancellation, staffing change or urgent request, ripples through a schedule. Each cancellation has a cost and the impact of those challenges soar when you’re working with thousands of clients.

AI done the right way gives us the best way to handle what can become a morass of moving pieces. With information available when it's needed, we spend less time on paperwork and more time focussed on delivering care.

Those who fear or are yet to adopt AI leave themselves open to this morass, manually rebuilding schedules whenever circumstances shift.

AI gives us better intelligence, being able to process more accurate data more effectively.

As the complexity of delivering care increases there is a risk that some providers will fall short on legacy platforms containing masses of data stored in a manner, largely preventing them the ability to extract and process that data usefully.

This might be best highlighted with a broad example. An older person living at home by themselves may experience a fall when a personal care worker isn’t there.

They may report the fall on the next visit to their home care provider but there may be a delay of hours until that information gets to the case worker.

AI can pull that information out and instantly alerts a care manager who can then book follow up medical checks for example.

Importantly for an older person, turning their entire care history into effective care actions will differentiate providers known for their service excellence and quality of care.

With increased complexity in delivering home care, providers must be able to acquire and analyse information quickly.

Some fear that AI will eventually replace humans in the planning and scheduling of aged care, particularly home care. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

As demand for aged care rises in the coming decades, both humans and artificial intelligence will be needed to wade through more client information and logistics.

In our vision to continue to enable our client to live their best lives, AI is definitely a critical enabler that allows us to achieve higher outcomes than would otherwise be possible.

AI is here to highlight crucial information, but it will be the passionate, experienced and dedicated human beings allocating and providing the care that will be central to catering for home care demand into the future.