Latest / Home Health Revealed (+Palliative and Hospice) / 134: AI in Home Health: Beyond the Buzz

Transcript

134: AI in Home Health: Beyond the Buzz · Home Health Revealed (+Palliative and Hospice)

• 0:02
  Speaker A: You're listening to Home Health Revealed, where the business of home health comes to life. Hosted by Hannah Vail, each episode brings real conversations with the leaders, innovators and experts shaping the future of the industry. From reimbursement and technology to leadership and growth, this is Home Health Revealed.
• 0:17
  Speaker B: Welcome to Home Health Revealed. Welcome back. Today we are going to be diving into one of the biggest topics that is shaping our industry right now. We're which is artificial intelligence and what it actually means for agencies on the ground, not just those buzzwords. My guest today is John Atkinson, CTO of Axis Care, who recently led a survey of over 400 industry leaders to find out how they're really thinking about AI. John, thanks so much for joining me.
• 0:50
  Speaker C: I'm happy to be here. It's exciting to get to chat about this with you.
• 0:54
  Speaker B: Yeah. Now, you are known for taking complex tech concepts and making them easy for anyone to understand, which is exactly what we need for a conversation like this. So you're going to walk us through what Access Care's new AI industry survey found and then more importantly for our listeners, what it really means for the day to day operations.
• 1:16
  Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. There were some really interesting findings and you know, we really value hearing from the folks out there in the industry that are doing the work day to day, understanding what kind of situations and challenges they're facing, how they're thinking about it, and then that really shapes the solutions that we provide and the approaches that we take to doing that. So we were really delighted to get such a robust response to the survey and we learned a lot through the results of it as well.
• 1:46
  Speaker B: Yeah. What surprised you most about how people in home care are actually using or just thinking about AI right now?
• 1:53
  Speaker C: I would say one of the key findings that really jumped out to me was this idea that a lot of people are talking about AI and only a few people, only a few agencies have actually started to really experience that transformation. Our survey, we asked, are you experiencing transformation or where are you at? And about 15% of the respondents said they're experiencing transformation, which felt a little lower than what we thought it would be initially given all of the discussion. But what really stood out there is that 77% of the agencies said that they were in this state of either evaluating, adopting or piloting AI. And so what that told me is that we're still early in this journey of people actually experiencing the transformation. But so many of us are in that place of like, let's figure it out, let's find the spot where we think it could work. Let's understand, you know, what use cases are best, and let's move the ball forward. And then there were. There were a few folks that were not yet doing anything, but that part of the pie is really shrinking. What is what we've seen.
• 3:13
  Speaker B: Yeah, I feel like I've heard some similar conversations. Definitely agree. I think if I were to categorize what I hear, just going to different conferences, having different conversations, is that curiosity is really, really high. But I don't think people know exactly what to do about it yet. I do even feel like with all of the chatter, some agencies do feel behind just because they're not sure where to implement what they can trust some of those different factors. So for agencies that feel behind on AI, where should they realistically start?
• 3:51
  Speaker C: Yeah, well, and one of the things that I really have also seen in my conversations is that a lot of people feel behind. And one of the encouragements that I offer there is that if you're even asking the question and trying to do something, you're actually not behind. You're in that group with the other 77%. And so really what I would say is identify an area of, of your operation that is causing a lot of friction and pain right now and see if there are some AI tools that can help in that area. And as I was thinking about this, one of the quotes that I've heard that I like to reshare is that really, AI enables us to expand the scope of our ambition. Things that we wouldn't have even thought were possible before are things that we can consider now. And so I almost think of AI as like a genie in the bottle to where we could say, man, I really wish, and before, you know, I think maybe we wouldn't have even bothered to like, really consider that wish. Right. I wish caregivers would just clock in on time all the time.
• 5:07
  Speaker B: Right.
• 5:08
  Speaker C: Like we, we laugh because there's like, well, yeah, that, that's a great wish, but it's totally not realistic. I think with, with AI capabilities, we can start to actually contemplate those wishes a little bit more and say, you know what, that. I know that wasn't possible three years ago, but is that possible today? Is there a solution out there that could help fulfill that wish? Maybe not a hundred percent, but maybe 80%. What if my caregivers clocked in 80% more than they ever did before? That would be awesome.
• 5:39
  Speaker B: Yeah, that would be a huge progress.
• 5:42
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 5:42
  Speaker C: So I just encourage people to think of AI as a little bit of a genie in a Bottle and just give that wish a little bit of thought time there to be like, hey, is there something that I could do about that? And that can be a good starting point.
• 5:59
  Speaker B: And I do think people are using AI, whether agencies or companies like to think they are or not. Most people I talk to are at least using it personally and applying it to even simple things like communication, like synthesis of information, maybe not even the way that we would want it to be used necessarily, but I do think everybody is dabbling. And so when we are thinking about it from a corporate or company perspective, I think we need to think about how we can best use it. Like you're talking about with some of those friction or pain points initially. But then also you've talked about AI being more powerful when it's truly built into a system of record, as opposed to it being a bolt on or just, you know, a bot friend that kind of sits beside you during the day. Can you explain what the difference looks like in practice for an agency owner or administrator who might be thinking through some of those things?
• 6:57
  Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think there are a lot of trade offs to consider in terms of how we implement the AI and what those implications are for our business on an ongoing basis. And when I talk to home care providers, many of them will say we just, we want it to be, we want our operations to be within one platform. We don't want to have to continue to go out to these third parties that do these really specific tasks. Even if they do them well, it's just that much more operational friction. And so I think really AI functions best when it's seamless and when you don't have to feel like you're going and doing this additional task in this other place. The people that we talk to want the AI to be where they're doing their work. And many of them are doing that in their system of record. And so one example of that would be the care analytics capability that we released last fall where we actually use an AI, an LLM, to analyze all the care notes that your caregivers are leaving on their visits to help the agency quickly read through those and see if there's something that they need to urgently pay attention to. And so the AI is fantastic at analyzing care notes. It looks to see, you know, is something urgent, high, medium, low priority, what category is it? You know, is it a medication issue, is it a fall risk? All these different things that could be buried in that care note and, and then they seamlessly surface those on the dashboard so that Someone can just come in to their platform, come into Access Care and see, hey, there's this urgent thing I need to take care of and then turn it into a workflow. All that documentation and everything lives in the platform they're using today. And you can imagine how that's easier than having to go to another place to check that information and to manage it and to operationalize the workflow, just having it embedded within that system. We think there are a lot of advantages to that and that's certainly the approach that work taking is trying to build as many of those AI capabilities into the platform as possible.
• 9:07
  Speaker B: Yeah. To help with prioritization. Because I think there's a competition for our attention. There's a competition for what we're seeing every day with just, we're inundated with information. I think using AI for the simple idea of serving up, hey, here are your priorities today. That is, that's a huge benefit. We utilize a platform for RCM called Velocity. And I always like, sort of started joking about because I'm a coffee person, you know, you should be able to see the health of your organization with one cup of coffee. Right. Just very quickly at the beginning of your day, have that dashboard up and those priorities should set you off on your day as quickly as you can consume that cup of coffee. And I do think that AI being embedded, having that warm, right, warm friend to hand you, hey, this is where we're seeing some gaps today. This is where it's low hanging fruit if you will, you can do these things. So I really do. I love having it seamless as opposed to a bolt on. I think that makes it just, it grabs our attention and it causes us to focus differently. And I don't know about you, but a lot of people and myself included, sometimes just getting into my day to day, it's where do I put my focus today?
• 10:30
  Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And really having to manage another platform distracts from that focus. Right. Because you have to, you know, as you're thinking about implementing it, there's a whole process of implementing another solution. You're already trusting your system of record. Right. You've already built that trust relationship. There's, you need to establish that with a third party again. So there's additional barriers and hurdles even just to the adoption piece. So our hope and goal is to make both the adoption experience easy and seamless as well as just the ongoing operation of it being right where you're
• 11:07
  Speaker B: already working today now with these 400 industry leaders that you received the Survey back from what were some of the biggest fears or hesitations that you heard from leaders within that survey?
• 11:21
  Speaker C: Yeah, I would say by far the one that stands out the most is a concern that implementing AI will make home care less human. That's a legitimate concern. It's very widespread. And people are thinking about the value of home care is really, it's fundamentally one person caring for another person and nobody wants that to go away. Right. That's a huge part of what the home care industry is and does. And so that's one of the concerns. I think there are a lot of ways to address that, but that's one of the predominant ones that I'm hearing.
• 12:03
  Speaker B: How would you address those concerns if you are an agency leader? People fear for their jobs, right? They fear for just what their day to day is going to look like. How would you tell an agency leader to respond to some of those fear concerns?
• 12:19
  Speaker C: Yeah, I think two of the questions that I encourage people to ask is one, what can AI do today in my agency? And then what should it do in my agency? And do I want AI to be, for example, analyzing care notes? That's a pretty good use case for it, right? That actually is one that can make home care more human because it enables your office staff to be aware of what's going on with your clients. They're spending more time then responding to your clients and less time reading notes. So that's one of those. Does it make it more human in the end? I think another one would be a use case of caregivers forgetting to clock in. Somebody's got to follow up with those caregivers to make sure they're there and to just record that information. That is not something that is going to make home care more human as tracking down that clock in, but it's something that needs to be done. Again, that's a fantastic role for AI. I think a lot of agencies are thinking about do I want AI doing scheduling things for my caregivers? You know, there's some, there's a lot of people that say yes and there's some people that say no to that. Similarly, would I want AI talking to my clients? Under certain circumstances, some people would say yes, some people would say no. I think it depends a lot upon the agency and what their needs are at that time. So really asking those, those thoughtful questions I think helps home care providers discern what is the right fit for my agency and not feeling like they've got to farm everything out.
• 14:10
  Speaker B: I would also venture to say that if you Asked caregivers, what parts of your day or what parts of your job would you love to have taken off your plate? Chances are they're not going to say seeing my patients, holding my patients hands. Right. Being in the room, like they're not going to give you those things because they're caregivers and that's what they're wired to do. They're going to say things like help with my documentation, take some of these more cumbersome, mindless things off my plate. And I say great, because that's exactly what it can do for you. Yes. And my hope in thinking about this as an industry wide adoption is that we can take more of the human facing caregiving stuff and give our people the power to do more of that. And then all of the yuck stuff we don't, we don't want to do anyways really, that we can have AI take on some of that more tedious work that's just time consuming. But doesn't truly, I'm going to say, impact the patient, although I don't truly feel that way. But it's not that patient facing care. Right. Do I think that charts impact the patient? They absolutely do because they're representative of their career. But I think you understand where I'm going with this. Just giving humans the opportunity to do more of those human to human kinds of connection things that AI is never going to replace. It's truly not. We're just not designed that way. So yeah, yeah, that's right.
• 15:46
  Speaker C: And I think, yeah, I'm excited about that too. And I think too, what you're describing reminds me of the concept of being able to delegate the work to AI, even for those like charting notes and some different things like that. But the responsibility for the outcomes still belong to the person in charge. Right. So we delegate the work but not the responsibility. I think that's another key concept is we learn to operationalize AI.
• 16:16
  Speaker B: So if you had to predict where AI in home care is headed over the next two to three years, and I mean that even feels like a long time because I feel like we've come so far in just a matter of months. I was just talking to somebody the other day and I said this could be a totally different conversation in five or six months because we truly have seen growth that's escalated. We've seen adoption that I think has become more and more accepted. I do feel like we're in an industry that's probably slower to adopt and does have a high pain tolerance for some of those things that we don't like to do. We're willing to work with older systems sometimes just because it's how we've always done it. But I do think that we are getting to a place where these conversations are happening. People are realizing there's more out there. There are different ways we can do this. We're going to have to be innovative and adopt technology and operational processes that help our caregivers really do their jobs to the best of their ability. They help us meet payer requirements quicker. I mean, there's a plethora of things that it can do. But what do you think if we're looking at our crystal ball and saying in two to three years, what would you tell our listeners to prepare for?
• 17:32
  Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's a great question and really the right one to be asking because AI is here and it's growing in terms of its capabilities and it has the opportunity and the potential to have a huge impact on, on our home care operations. And so as we think about it and as I talk to home care providers, there are kind of four categories of work in a home care agency that we really see this making an impact on. The first one is growth. And so the ability to bring in new clients and new caregivers. I think that there will be a big opportunity for AI to help streamline and augment some of those processes while continuing to make them human. But if you think about getting new caregivers, if you've got to replace 60 to 70% of them every year just to stay where you are, that's a huge operational workload. I think there's going to be a lot of AI capabilities around that as well as the client intake process. We also hear a lot about the coordinating process, all the phone calls that come into an agency every day to change schedules and to deal with availability and all the things that just happen day to day in an agency, I think there's a lot of those coordination activities that AI can help with. The third one would be the billing piece. So once you've delivered this care, really collecting all of that money that is owed to you, if you're dealing with Medicaid and va, there's a lot of compliance related things. There's a lot of mechanics of just collecting that money. So I think that's a third area. And then a fourth would be that compliance and quality of care piece. So again, we were talking about documentation earlier. AI can really help with that. It can make sure that you are not letting things slip through the cracks. So I would Say, across those four operational areas, we're going to see a lot of tools, and then my prediction would be that you're going to see them embedded within your system of record. And I say that because that's what we're building. And so that's not a hard prediction to make in that. In that case, yeah.
• 19:51
  Speaker B: So if people that are listening want to talk with you a little bit more about Access Care about the platform, give us a little synopsis and then tell us where they can find you.
• 20:01
  Speaker C: Absolutely. So the first place would be to go to our website. We do talk a lot about AI on there and we invite people that are on our platform today to sign up for a demo and to learn about that. We also talk about it online in lots of different places. You can find me on LinkedIn. We're always talking about AI online and then webinars like this one. These are great opportunities to just have conversations about what's really going on in the industry today.
• 20:34
  Speaker B: Agree. So, yeah, if you are listening and you are curious about Axis Care about some of these conversations with AI, please do visit their website. It's access care.com. right? Right.
• 20:45
  Speaker C: That's right.
• 20:46
  Speaker B: A x I s c a dot com. Reach out to John Atkinson. You can find him on LinkedIn and start asking questions. Let your curiosity run wild a little bit. And if you have questions about the survey in particular, is there a place where they can access that information?
• 21:08
  Speaker C: Absolutely. You can actually get the survey results on our website. There's a spot where you can go to download those and we'd love to share those with you.
• 21:17
  Speaker B: Awesome. Well, thank you, John, so much. This has been a really great conversation. I really enjoyed it and I think we're going to continue to see development within the industry. So, you know, maybe we should check in before then, but definitely in two to three years to see if our predictions have come true.
• 21:33
  Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Hannah, thanks for having me on. It was really great talking with you today.
• 21:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, thanks so much.