Latest / The Shift Ahead with Ken Bell / Give Nurses Their Time Back with Cory Evans
Transcript
- speaker-0: I think understanding that complexity, the only way to do it is to be in it. And I think it's like anything else in life, unless you've walked in the shoes, it's very difficult to understand those pain points. speaker-1: Yeah. I'm Ken Bell with Careability, and this is the shift ahead. Five minutes, three questions, and one expert, helping operators and clinicians prepare for what's coming next. Let's get into it. Corey, you started in occupational therapy and helped run nursing facilities. Is there a resident or experience that still shapes how you make decisions today? speaker-0: I would certainly go back to my time beginning, even twenty five years ago when I was an OT starting in nursing homes and providing direct care. I started getting into AI and technology was ultimately out of necessity. I was working on a hall in my rehab department and I was hearing a number of call lights that kept ringing. I got out of my office and started answering the calls going down the hall. And I was getting frustrated, going, Where are my nurses? When well, when I actually got to the nurses station, I had four nurses with stacks of hospital records because we had four people admit at the same time. And the reason they weren't on the hall is because they were feverishly putting data in the electronic health record system. And so what is interesting about that is my compassion changed from the resident and transitioned to my staff. And I'm like, how do I help my staff not have to do this manual administrative work and back to the halls? Because ultimately That's why they became a nurse or a therapist or a physician was to spend time with the patients, not doing the administrative work. The hardest thing that I saw as an operator and taking care of the residents was just the, you know, the administrative burden that comes from regulations that are not only coming from federal, but also at the state level. When is state survey gonna show up in the building? Are we prepared? Are we doing checking all our boxes? And what sometimes I got most frustrated with is What was at the bottom of that totem pole was spending time with the resident. speaker-1: So do admissions teams struggle to piece together before a resident arrives and how is that shaping what you're building with AI? speaker-0: I was able to find out firsthand the struggles of the admissions team and and I was overseeing a multi multitude of buildings and coincidentally enough, there was a week where one of our admission ki coordinators was out and I just said, you know what, I'll do it. I'd never done it before. I jumped in her seat and holy cow, within three hours I realized I was in over my head. I was getting referrals coming in left and right. I'm getting phone calls from case managers. Can you take this patient? I'm like, I haven't even seen the paper. The paperwork was 300 pages high. And I'm going, I have to say yes to this and make sure that we can meet the needs of this patient, that they don't have something that my staff can't manage. And on top of that, is there something high cost that's prohibitive of us taking this resident? So that my administrator goes, why did you say yes? Realize really quickly that that was an enormous burden on our staff, that I I just don't know how they did it day in and day out. The way we see AI helping mitigate that manual process is really using technology to surface those data points so the teams can effectively make those decisions and look at clinical capabilities of our facility to that patient. Do they match? speaker-1: What's the next big shift in skilled nursing and what will it mean for operators and residents? speaker-0: Say the next big shift, you know, that's really gonna impact operators and residents alike, I would say is predictive analytics. Ultimately, if we can surface that data in a way that allows our clinician to make the right call at the right time, it's bringing tremendous value, number one, to the resident because they're not having to be readmitted to the hospital. But ultimately, operations are smoother because we're we have more predictability. of revenue and helping that resident get home quicker. The providers that are going to succeed the most in the next ten years are going to be the ones that ultimately learn how to adopt technology to support their clinicians. Because ultimately if you can support your clinicians better, you know, at the end of the day they can provide better care.