After shifting out of the pandemic period, many senior living and care operators are faced with the return of business-as-usual regulatory compliance issues, both at the state and federal level.
One new startup is leveraging artificial intelligence to tackle this growing regulatory burden for skilled nursing facilities in particular by building tools that automate certain processes or provide administrators with crucial notifications.
The company, Clearpol Inc., recently received $3.3 million in fundraising from investors, and is hoping to quickly build out new tools, Clearpol’s CEO, Arash Hosseini Jafari, told the McKnight’s Tech Daily Thursday.
Jafari described the company’s AI as a “co-pilot” that can “look over the shoulder” of staff or administrators by providing regulatory insights or alerting about public health orders. But its major innovation is being able to pour through an operator’s documents, policies and procedures and analyze them for any deviations from regulatory requirements, Jafari said.
“AI has improved drastically over the past few years,” Hosseini Jafari told McKnight’s Thursday. “When we started, AI was only a part of our vision. It couldn’t do real Q-and-A’s. But now, we’re leveraging all this new research. Every month AI is expanding at the same it was the prior two years combined.”
Clearpol was first introduced during the pandemic, when much regulation was based around mitigation and infection prevention, Hosseini Jafari noted.
During that time, many concerns, such as licensing, were put on hold, leading to an auditing backup that both regulators and facility operators are working to fix.
Currently, Clearpol is hoping to expand its partnerships, though it is working with a number of SNFs in California, as well as in other heavily populated states such as Florida, New York and Texas, Hosseini Jafari said.
Although AI’s role in healthcare contexts remains a concern, current staffing shortages and a strong understanding by developers about what AI is best used for have led to general enthusiasm for similar tools, he added, noting that “everyone hates the kind of drudgery work of regulatory compliance.”
