Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most-cited transformational force in home-based care, with promises of improved retention and the potential to slash onerous documentation requirements — but adoption is not without its caveats.

Home Health Care News asked five executives for their thoughts on the most transformational technology reshaping the home-based care industry.

AI was a recurring theme across the executives’ responses. AI tools have previously been linked to value-based care adoption, improved clinical outcomes, transformed back-office operations and helped home-based care providers land significant investor dollars. The polled executives pointed to AI as a tool for improving staffing challenges and relieving operational friction — while some warned of problems with AI tools or a lack of readiness for adoption.

Leaders also cited remote patient monitoring, wearables and other devices as technology set to change the industry.

The AI opportunity

For the five polled leaders, AI was the most common answer to the question of what technology will be most transformational in the home-based care industry.

For Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder of Honor, the “obvious” answer is AI. The influence of AI goes beyond home-based care, he added, as the technology is reshaping “everything.”

Honor is a home care technology company that acquired home care provider Home Instead in 2021, creating a combined technology and care services platform.

Some leaders pointed to specific AI use cases as the most likely to transform the industry. Cooper Linton, associate vice president for Duke HomeCare and Hospice, said that documentation has always been an onerous barrier in home-based care, due to significant volumes of documentation required among frontline staff.

“Whatever ambient listening and AI organization that figures out how to harness the capture of verbal information from our caregivers and then format it correctly in the necessary mechanism for both the [electronic medical record] (EMR) and for the [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] (CMS) is going to win the day,” Linton told HHCN.

Durham, North Carolina-based Duke HomeCare & Hospice is part of Duke University Health System and provides home health care, infusion, hospice and bereavement services. It provides home infusion services in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, and home health services in nine North Carolina counties.

John Sneath, founder and CEO at Tribute Home Care, pointed to large language AI models as the tool that is reshaping the home-based care industry.

“We tend to use Claude a lot, and we now have a dedicated person at Tribute who is doing nothing but creating these tools based on a vision that each one of our departments or functions at Tribute has about how their operations need to develop over the next number of years, and then what AI tools or what technology tools would be most helpful in making that happen,” Sneath said.

Framingham, Massachusetts-based Tribute provides home care services, including personal care, companionship and dementia care in Massachusetts, Maryland, Chicago and Northern Virginia.

These large language models will not reduce the number of jobs, Sneath added, but have slowed down Tribute’s rate of hiring. Sneath also cited tools that screen job applications and automatically update care plans as technologies that could reshape the industry.

AI technology has also become much easier to use, Sneath said, and that ease is “really a game changer.”

Todd Treml, CEO of Touching Hearts at Home, named AI-powered scheduling and communication tools as the AI technology most likely to transform the industry, but also identified wearables and remote care technology as game-changing.

“It could be some of the suppliers that have wristbands,” Treml said. “It could be devices that allow us to track what is going on with our client and looking at all kinds of things that are happening in the house: wandering, gait, getting up in the middle of the night, all those things that we can now monitor without being there.”

Minnetonka, Minnesota-based Touching Hearts at Home is a franchise home care provider. Founded in 2006, the provider’s home care offerings include companionship, transportation, light housekeeping and dementia care.

On the AI side, Touching Hearts at Home is testing AI scheduling tools to improve communications between schedulers and caregivers, which has the potential to shave significant amounts of time off the day-to-day workflow, Treml said.

Adoption barriers, continued momentum

But not all providers are confident that potentially transformative technology is ready for broad adoption.

Leslee Deanes-Bryant, founder and CEO of UltraCare Services, said some AI technology remains unready for implementation.

“I do think people feel AI [is the most transformational]. I don’t agree, and I’ll tell you why,” Deanes-Bryant said. “We are interacting with older people. AI has a delay. Some of them have hearing problems. … You have people replacing humans with AI. That’s not possible in this elderly community because they don’t understand what’s going on, and when they ask that one question, the AI won’t be able to answer.”

While Deanes-Bryant warned of client-facing AI use, UltraCare has had great success with an AI scheduling platform, she said.

Los Angeles-based UltraCare provides personal care, respite care and veteran care in Los Angeles and surrounding areas.

According to Sternberg, providers are psychologically ready to adopt new technology because of the excitement around AI — but they do not necessarily know how to implement it. He suggested that not all AI products are fully vetted, and when a home-based care provider is too eager to adopt technology, they may end up with a tool that does not benefit their business.

“People aren’t equipped to validate these things, and I’ve seen like really interesting cases where people moved way too fast to deploy technology that was marketed well, … and then we dive in on the stats, and it’s actually damaging net to their businesses.”

Still, the potential benefits of AI technology, including cost savings, improved employee job satisfaction and enhanced retention, necessitate that providers engage with the technology.

“You’ve got to get ready for it,” Linton said. “Whoever retains the most staff wins.”