Artificial intelligence is everywhere now, from automated chatbots on customer service websites to novelty computer-generated images meant mostly for their entertainment value. But AI and the machine learning technologies behind it are starting to find their way into healthcare, taking some of the drudgery out of producing clinical notes and billing claims, as well as helping researchers unlock some of their data.
Home-based healthcare providers can (and should) look at artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to automate repetitive tasks, allowing their professional caregivers and support staff to work more efficiently and to spend time on what matters most: caring for their patients.
AlayaCare is a home-based health and community care management platform that helps homecare agencies manage everything from referrals to scheduling to patient care. The platform utilizes machine learning to identify patients who are at risk of an adverse event such as a re-hospitalization. AlayaCare also uses the technology to reduce wait times for high-risk patients, improve caregiver retention, flag critical notes to caregivers, and ensure the models are explainable to clinicians in order to create trust for the predictions.
Because the home-health workforce is remote and mobile, having cloud-based applications is an absolute must for improving management of patients across the continuum of their needs. AlayaCare has migrated all of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud for maximum flexibility.
The company has been a beta tester for Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed AWS generative AI service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies.
"Leveraging AWS generative AI services, AlayaCare can use large language models to automatically extract clinical information from unstructured documents and summarize their change in condition since the last visit," said Naomi Goldapple, Senior Vice President of Data & Intelligence at AlayaCare.
AlayaCare recently previewed a smart AI assistant called Layla that relies on LLMs to help caregivers with a multitude of tasks. It uses natural language to improve health outcomes, like an Alexa for home health. Layla will be released in 2024.
The company has several generative AI pilots underway to help predict patient risk and mitigate expensive rehospitalizations, thereby improving patient outcomes. Layla and other AlayaCare AI projects will progressively reduce the amount of manual labor required to capture structured data.
For example, when a visiting caregiver travels to a patient's home, generative AI can provide a summary of that patient's current health status by making sense of unstructured clinical notes, structured patient demographic information, visit data and even wearable devices.
When multiple providers see a patient, each one may not be cognizant of everything going on with the patient, since new data is constantly being collected. AlayaCare’s AI products will help identify critical incidents providers should pay attention to based on factors such as persistent dizziness and falls, among others.
AI technology will also help remove some of the drudgery of post-visit notation and chart review, which historically has been a very manual process. "AI will give us earlier indicators of health issues that a patient may be experiencing, and preventative measures can be taken," Goldapple said.
Machine learning can also predict employee performance and reduce employee churn by monitoring for patterns like late or missed visits or low-quality notes so that managers can provide attention, resources and training to minimize employee churn and increase their engagement.
In each case, the AlayaCare platform and the power of AWS will help reduce overall home-based healthcare costs and increase positive health outcomes by preventing the need for rehospitalization and other acute interventions.
AlayaCare is an end-to-end software platform for public, private, non-profit and community home-based care organizations that manages the entire client lifecycle, including needs assessments, care plans, scheduling, visit and route optimization, and visit verification. Founded in 2014 with over 600 employees, AlayaCare combines traditional in-home and virtual care solutions that enable care providers to lower the cost of care and achieve better outcomes for their clients.
For more information, visit: http://www.alayacare.com.