Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably hearing a lot (maybe even more than you care to) about AI. But there’s a huge gap between what AI proponents are promising and what businesses are actually accomplishing.
Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly (RCFEs) are no exception. AI could be transforming your business, but only if you know how to apply it strategically.
Today, we want to focus on some actionable ways you can use AI to lower risks for your facility. We’re highlighting how monitoring technology can power the advantage up further, too.
Practical examples: Ways your RCFE could use AI
To take this concept from pie-in-the-sky to something you can actually hand to your boots on the ground, let’s go over a few ways you could use AI and monitoring technology.
Fall prevention
If you deploy monitoring technology like wearables for your residents or bed/chair occupancy sensors, it can potentially provide early warnings.
Over time, AI can learn signs that indicate a resident is at greater risk for a fall. The occupancy sensors can alert you if a resident starts to get up more regularly without staff assistance, for example. Similarly, wearables can monitor gait and balance, then AI can detect potentially problematic changes.
This allows your team to increase supervision or adjust care plans for higher-risk residents. Every fall prevented increases your RCFE’s quality of care and lowers your overall costs.
Medication safety
In our pharmacological age, most residents take a slew of medications. Managing them is key for your facility, especially if you want to lower your risk level.
If your team records doses digitally, AI can analyze that data. It can then create automatic alerts when residents miss a dose that could create a significant health risk.
It can also monitor overall adherence patterns. This helps you identify areas where your facility is getting exposed to risk, whether that’s a staff member who’s being negligent or a resident who continually refuses their dose.
By detecting deviations from the set medication management plan, AI helps your team step in sooner.
Proactive risk analysis
If you implement monitoring technology and pair it with AI, it helps your facility gather, then analyze data. That allows you to keep your residents safer, in turn reducing your facility’s liability exposure.
If a resident has a wearable device, for example, AI can flag changes. Maybe they’ve been walking more slowly or their sleep quality has been poorer than usual. These little signals would be very easy to miss. By surfacing them, the combination of monitoring tech and AI makes it possible for you to make care adjustments. This improves outcomes for both your residents and your RCFE.
Managing privacy concerns with AI and monitoring technology
As you think about implementing monitoring tech and leveraging AI, keep patient privacy at the forefront. You might decide to use edge AI, for example. With this setup, video footage gets processed by AI but not stored. The AI alerts you to issues (e.g., a resident fall), but it doesn’t capture any private information.
There’s a lot to consider here, and doing it thoughtfully can help your RCFE lower its risk levels. That might even help to make your liability coverage more affordable. To explore that opportunity, contact our team at InsureMyRCFE at (805) 413-5668 today.
