Artificial intelligence can be used for predictive analytics, scheduling and anticipating workforce needs and automating tasks such as intake — and, increasingly, those uses are coming to the long-term care market.
“AI has a great deal of potential to positively impact our healthcare system,” said Allison Rainey, head of nursing and clinical informatics at MatrixCare.
For example, allowing staffing coordinators to align staffing models with resident needs already is yielding improved care and clinician satisfaction, she added. In her view, the most meaningful solutions have the potential to boost healthcare worker and resident satisfaction and support quality outcomes and
overall operations.
In the best-use case, providers can use AI to help free up the time workers spend on administrative tasks, allowing them to focus more on providing high-quality care and services, said Regan Parker, chief legal and public affairs officer at ShiftKey.
AI-generated data also are giving community managers and administrators exponentially deeper insights into operations such as workload and resident numbers, allowing them to optimize scheduling and more accurately forecast workforce needs, Parker added.
The millions of data points being generated by AI yield mounds of new information. AI’s potential for good, however, is tempered by warnings that include potential for fraud and the need for better means of validation. A recent article in JAMDA—The Journal of Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine warned of the risk of waning support for AI among facilities if installations failed to scale up and spread.
Other concerns center on data integrity, privacy and bias, the lack of comprehensive guidelines and the so-called “black box” concerns over issues like transparency, according to Rainey.
“AI is becoming more and more prevalent, and while we need to consider potential consequences, as we do with all technology and tools, we need to find a way to work with it,” Parker said. “We need to think of AI as a tool to empower healthcare workers and facilities, not as something to fear.”
