AI can be used for predictive analytics, scheduling, and anticipating workforce needs and automating tasks such as patient 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 patient acuity and 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, nursing homes can use AI to help free up the time healthcare workers spend on administrative tasks, allowing them to focus more on providing high-quality patient care,” said Regan Parker, chief legal and public affairs officer at ShiftKey.
AI-generated data also is giving nursing home managers and administrators exponentially deeper insights into facility operations such as workload and patient 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. But AI’s potential for good is tempered by warnings that include potential for fraud and the need for better means of validation. A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association 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,” said Parker. “We need to think of AI as a tool to empower healthcare workers and facilities, not as something to fear.”
From the April/May 2024 Issue of McKnight's Long-Term Care News
