Data about care is becoming the backbone of home care best practice. In the past (and in some current settings) the home care worker has kept a book in the home for record keeping, bringing it in periodically to get paid. Today, organizations can use captured information about the home care situation, combining it with information aggregated from other clients or individual care recipient history. Data and the governance procedures to maintain its quality and security will, like other uses of AI, become the foundation for realizing its benefits in home care.
Executives see the possibilities for AI in home care. Home care and home health care are labor intensive industries. Hands-on work is historically preceded and followed by paper-based documents and tracking tools. However, it is increasingly likely that home care companies will move quickly past ‘Year One’ of AI as the labor-saving benefits are seen and realized. Interviewees, including agencies and tech firms, note the changes underway. Some are engaged in various pilot projects of AI-enabled tools, others are doing implementations, still others are already deployed. For example, report discussions surfaced the following:
An AI tech agent on our behalf – predicted long ago. Consider the definition: “An AI agent is a system that perceives its environment, makes decisions, and takes actions to achieve specific goals, often autonomously.” At first look, that seems quite scary and is reminiscent of two quite predictive fictions: HAL 9000 in 2001 (“Sorry, Dave, I can’t do that”) or the robot in the Robot and Frank (2012) that takes care of every need of a lonely man with dementia, then assists him in committing crimes.