Just as with any new and exciting technology, AI has slipped into our routines seemingly overnight. Coding, writing, research – it does it all. Most importantly, it does our busy work for us. No matter what age we are or what we do, it does our homework.
However, as we contend with the rapid incorporation of AI into our daily lives and careers, we begin to see where it fits, and where it doesn’t. Ignoring new technology that is changing the landscape of how we learn and work isn’t an option, but becoming overly-reliant on it also has its drawbacks.
For caregivers responsible for the health and wellness of their children, spouses, aging parents, or siblings, AI can be a lifesaver. Caregivers are well-aware of the time-consuming and often confusing aspects of their role, so anything with the potential to answer their questions, set their schedule, or do research on their behalf is welcome.
Although, just as with any other role, finding the right balance of AI and human oversight is an important lesson to learn, especially for those dealing directly with sensitive healthcare information.
How Can AI Help Caregivers?
Caregivers can use AI to simplify several of their time-consuming responsibilities, including research, scheduling, and monitoring. There are also strides being made in the healthcare industry that may help increase availability of medical experts and reduce busy work for senior living staff.
In the U.S., 64% of people receiving care at home are currently relying solely on unpaid loved ones. This caregiver crisis has forced many into a role they are not qualified for, nor do they have the time to do.
AI is positioned to take on some of this mental load. That is, if it is used correctly.
Early intervention
Recognizing new symptoms in yourself or a loved one as soon as they appear is one of the best ways to prevent grief down the line. By addressing issues early and seeking preventative care, what might otherwise be a serious diagnosis can be reduced to something manageable.
The only issue is that not everyone understands what signs they need to watch for when it comes to their loved ones. Lack of family medical history can mean ignored symptoms, and insufficient information about child development or aging can lead to missed diagnoses.
In other words, doubt and denial often keep us from the care we need.
Caregivers can find quick answers and alleviate worry by using AI to research symptoms and give non-professionals the terminology to use when advocating with doctors. It synthesizes the vast ocean of medical content online into something readable and personalized, and gives caregivers a starting point, and hopefully, answers.
That being said, AI may also convince you that a doctor visit is not warranted, even if it is. If you or a loved one are exhibiting changes in health, it is always a good idea to get an opinion from a trained professional. AI can help organize your thoughts and summarize your symptoms for your doctor, but it should not block you from pursuing a real diagnosis.
Disease management
Once a diagnosis is reached, the real work begins. Managing medications, monitoring changes, and seeking out the right treatment at the right time is a full-time job for caregivers.
With the assistance of AI, chronic disease management can be better monitored, even from afar. High blood pressure, diabetes, and heart failure can be tracked using data from wearable technology like Apple Watches or Fitbit.
Medication and appointments are also more easily tracked and followed with convenient reminders coordinated by chatbots.
Understanding care options
Between the constant medical jargon and unclear and ever-changing insurance options, caregivers often find themselves with a pile of unanswered questions in between each major medical event.
Using AI to decode healthcare options helps caregivers grasp next steps and options for care. It can also help with communication by simplifying a doctor’s recommendations for the layman. A boost in confidence when faced with the great unknown will help you navigate a complicated process.
Caregivers should be cautioned to do further research and seek out multiple professional opinions for final decisions. Although AI may be able to simplify a complicated process, it is still prone to hallucinating, and may pull its information from less than reputable sources. In this case, AI is best used as a way to organize options, translate confusing language, and come up with questions for the next doctor’s appointment.
Research and scheduling
Finding a local specialist, peer groups, or specialized summer camps is a task unto itself. Taking the time to comb through the options to find what is the most local, the most affordable, and the most relevant is a barrier that is hard to climb.
AI can give you a starting point, handing you personalized lists to match with your parameters. Even if you don’t find what you are looking for, it may give you a good place to start, or introduce you to new resources and sites that you may not have found otherwise.
Increased availability of medical staff
Nothing brings caregiving momentum to a halt as fast as learning that none of your carefully researched medical specialists are taking new patients. Or if they are, that they book out a year in advance.
In Amsterdam, AI is already helping clinicians see more patients. With their newly automated tasks and workflows in place, many are reporting that they’ve saved nearly three weeks worth of time. Half of those surveyed also claimed that, as a result, they were able to see an average of eight more patients a week.
On top of that, 39% reported that AI helped them identify or prevent potential medical errors before they could occur, leading to safer outcomes for their patients.
One possible drawback to this change is clinicians becoming overly reliant on AI, which may eventually lead to deskilling and the inability to do certain tasks without AI, leading to less oversight.
Home safety
According to the AARP, more than 9 in 10 people want to age in their own homes rather than a senior community. Considering the physical and cognitive changes that occur as we age, fulfilling this wish is often a difficult task for caregivers who want to keep their aging family members safe, even when they don’t live together.
With remote monitoring, caregivers have more peace of mind as AI-powered robots alert them of unusual changes or behavior or environment. This tech can learn speech and movement patterns, changes in temperature or moisture, or how often a fridge is accessed to keep caregivers up to date on the health and wellness of a loved one.
Monitoring options are also available on our phones. For example, iPhone users can use the phone’s sensors and AI to track movements throughout the day. The technology can detect changes in gait and alert to any noticeable changes.
The drawback here is that seniors may feel as though they’ve lost their right to privacy. If everything is alerting their caregiver to slight changes that may or may not be indicative of a sudden decline in health, they may lose patience with both the technology that is monitoring their every step, and their caregiver themselves.
To combat this, make sure to be transparent and discuss what your loved one would feel most comfortable with using, or how best you can work together to make sure that they are supported in the environment where they want to be.
In-home care agencies
Just like with the clinicians in Amsterdam, home care agencies are beginning to utilize AI to combat issues like caregiver shortages, rising operating costs, growing care complexity, compliance issues documentation, and quality monitoring.
By streamlining administrative tasks and improving the quality and accuracy of records and monitoring, patients receive a better quality of care.
Positive outcomes of AI in this case are dependent on clear governance. In other words, ownership and accountability to keep up with monitoring these systems to manage data and developments with the technology itself.
Long-term care
Similarly, long-term care facilities are also beginning to incorporate AI into their day-to-day work. While the tools are still in their earliest stages of development, there are several applications that may be streamlined, including:
- Assessments
- Diagnosis and treatment support
- Family caregiver assistance
- Monitoring
- Care navigation
The goal of AI adoption here is also to streamline time-consuming administrative tasks, support decision-making, and manage complex information. If successful, the combination of AI and human oversight may relieve some of the burden on what are already short-staffed facilities.
Again, there is a need for caution. As it stands now, AI is not immune from making errors, suffering from algorithmic bias, creating privacy vulnerabilities, and compounding an issue by autonomously executing tasks with no oversight. Guardrails need to be in place, AI experts need to be trained, and human oversight is needed to keep things running smoothly.
End-of-life care
The transition from hospital to hospice is a stressful time for patients and caregivers alike. Despite this, education and support in this area is lacking, leading to unmet needs.
AI has the potential to close some of these gaps, making this challenging transition more accessible to families who require more information on next steps. We are in early stages, and as these technologies are incorporated into the hospice system, adequate human oversight will help avoid the risk of increased misconceptions.
How to Use AI Responsibility
For caregivers that consider themselves casual users of AI, there are things to consider when incorporating it into major decisions for healthcare or wellness.
Ability to ask the right questions
Without the proper prompt in place, caregivers may waste their time with irrelevant information, or might receive a wrong answer that they then misinterpret.
Relying on inaccurate or hallucinated answers
AI is pulling from vast amounts of information and data, some of which is outdated or inaccurate. On top of that, if an answer cannot be found, AI will hallucinate an answer rather than admit to not finding one. Be sure to check your sources for accuracy.
Keeping security in mind
There is a security risk in entering all of you or a loved one’s personal medical information into a large language model. Be cognizant of how your data is used when relaying sensitive personal information.
Substituting medical professionals
The answers that AI gives you are a good starting point for understanding your care questions, but that does not make them a replacement for true medical opinions or recommendations. Just because ChatGPT says you don’t have to bother with a doctor’s visit does not make it true.
Although medical professionals encourage patients to use AI in partnership with a medical professional rather than instead of one, one survey found that more than half of adults had used AI to make a healthcare decision without consulting their doctor.
How Homethrive uses AI
The Homethrive Assistant is designed to provide caregivers with a safer, more secure, and more compliant alternative to public AI tools. It combines enterprise-grade privacy protections, approved caregiving content, personalized member context, and human oversight to help members get relevant support without compromising sensitive information.
- Private and secure by design: Built within Homethrive’s enterprise-grade environment to protect sensitive caregiving and health-related information.
- No public AI model training: Member conversations and personal details are not used to train public AI models.
- Grounded in trusted content: Responses are based on vetted caregiving resources and Homethrive-approved guidance, reducing the risk of inaccurate or unsupported answers.
- Personalized safely: Guidance can reflect member profile, eligibility, caregiving needs, preferences, and prior Homethrive interactions within a governed framework.
- Caregiving-specific guardrails: Designed to recognize sensitive topics and avoid providing professional medical, legal, or financial advice.
- Human escalation: Complex or sensitive situations can be routed to trained Homethrive Care Guides for human support.
- Built for action: Instead of generic information, the Assistant connects members to relevant Homethrive services, resources, and next steps.
Looking to the Future
We are still learning how AI can help patients and their caregivers, and the findings so far are exciting. However, just as with any other technology, we should avoid becoming overdependant on it, or accepting everything it tells us as fact.
One major rule of thumb is simply this: AI is well-suited as a digital assistant, not a doctor. It is something that can help you simplify complicated processes or jumpstart your research on community resources. Safety, scheduling, and organizing can all be done with the right tool or prompt.
And for caregivers, that can make all the difference.
Caregivers don’t have to choose between their careers and caregiving responsibilities. Contact us today to explore how Homethrive can enhance your clients, members, or employees’ well-being and productivity.
