Seven Things to Think About Before You Consider Letting Your Home Health Providers Use AI for Patient Care, Documentation, or Other Duties
You can’t just bolt on AI and expect things to get better. If you don’t take these steps first, AI use will only add to your care team’s workload, detract from patient care, and multiply your IT spend.
As Melissa Bailey pointed out in our recent Clini-Chat discussion:
“AI, at its best, allows a nurse and a doctor to…really augment documentation, workflow efficiencies, to upskill clinicians, to upskill providers so that they're no longer spending the majority of their day looking at a screen, but looking at a patient.”
That begs the question:
What does it take to get AI working “at its best” in the home health space?
I sat down with Melissa, as well as Ian Fogg from Stratix, to get their thoughts and ended up with this list:
1. Choose the right mobile device, because a consumer smartphone or tablet is not the right device for a home health environment. (This is one of the top mistakes they see people making, and the consequences of this first wrong choice being that everything else you do from a tech perspective becoming more difficult or less effective.)
2. Consider the connectivity requirements, and don’t take shortcuts here. (AI won’t work if it is dependent on a cloud you can’t connect to because the wireless signal is weak.)
3. Put a finer point on security impacts and risk mitigation.
4. Consider the convenience of the user experience, not the convenience of getting a mobility “solution” online.
5. Don’t underestimate the value of having a standard mobility solution for your entire home health agency. (Letting some employees use personal devices while requiring others to use agency-owned devices is creating so much chaos for so many home health agencies the three of us work with.)
6. Don’t think of “loss” only in terms of “theft” or only as a device-specific concern. There’s a lot more data and privacy-related losses occurring in the home health space because agencies don’t have control over providers’ devices, can’t track them or properly support them, or fail to look at the security of the software running on those devices.
7. Don’t make the mistake of discounting a “better technology” as the more expensive option. If you do that, you may not have the right foundation in place to support AI use later on.
My advice?
1. Bring the right people to the table, even if that means bringing in several specialists from outside your organization to consult with your clinicians in the field about what they really need now.
2. Ask the right questions (and ask home health technology specialists what questions you should be asking).
You don’t know what you don’t know.
In fact, if you feel the technology you’ve put in place already isn’t helping as much as you hoped, it’s probably because…
-> You don’t truly know what your clinicians’ need, or
-> You don’t know everything you need to do behind-the-scenes to give clinicians the experience they’re telling you they need, whether that’s AI, a device with a duress button, or simply a wireless service plan that works everywhere they go.
From what I’ve seen as a nurse and CNIO the past several years, what trips people up is making technology-related purchases based on the recommendations of people who have a very limited amount of information about what you’re trying to do, what your current tech setup looks like, and the processes aren’t working well today.
That’s why you (as the decision-maker) must be able to ask the right questions of the right people. It’s also why you need a technology partner who can tell you when they don’t have all the answers but will direct you to someone who does.
As Ian pointed out in our Clini-Chat discussion, you may talk to your wireless carrier or the device manufacturer and get some advice about security or device management. However, they may not be asking you enough questions about your situation to offer a proper recommendation. So, you may not be getting all the information you need to make the best decision or get the return on investment (ROI) you want.
That’s why my best advice is to listen to what Ian and Melissa shared in our Clini-Chat discussion:
