Automation is no joke: we must bring meaningful technology to post-acute care

Meghan Mehlberg, LHNA, Customer Success Director and Healthcare Consultant at Amitech Solutions, thinks it’s about time we bring technology to long-term care facilities—but not in the ways often touted for nursing homes or assisted living facilities.

Meghan became a long-term care administrator at the age of 21. She oversaw thousands of patients and staff during her 13 years running post-acute care and long-term care facilities. “People choose to work in long-term care because you get to build relationships with the people you’re caring for,” says Meghan. But Meghan recalls a turning point at a conference she attended last year. There was one keynote that stuck with her: “How can technology transform long-term care?”

“The technology that was introduced to us,” says Meghan, “was an entertainment robot that, in a nursing home setting, can tell jokes and run range-of-motion exercises and a robot that delivers meals to people.” With record staff shortages and no reprieve in sight, the notion of joke-telling robots falls short. “I was so frustrated by this,” says Meghan. “These are things people should be doing.  These activities can be the highlight of a patient’s day, and this is where human connection comes from.”

Where does post-acute care fit in?

Post-acute care encompasses all patient care after a hospital discharge—rehab, home health, long-term care, or nursing home care. Medicare spends about $60 billion, or 15%, of its budget yearly on post-acute care, and costs are rising. One study predicts that post-acute care spending may surpass acute-care costs. “It’s the forgotten part of healthcare,” says Meghan. “But it’s pivotal, especially for older patients and people with disabilities.” Post-acute care is something most people will eventually navigate, either personally or with family or friends, and the staffing crisis should be cause for universal alarm.

Labor shortages in nursing homes made the news in 2020 following the COVID-19 outbreak, and the crisis is no better today. “By the beginning of 2023, essentially all other healthcare settings– hospitals, clinics, acute care– had bounced back within 3% of their pre-COVID levels,” explains Meghan.  “3% is still a huge hit,” she adds, “but long-term care, nursing homes in particular, never bounced back. We are still working at that loss.”

She describes a typical situation: an acute-care nurse might be responsible for four to five patients at a given time. But when it’s time to move their patient to a post-acute care facility, “you’re taking someone who an hour ago needed 1:4 care, and now they’re at 1:14 care. This is where the quality issues happen.”

Not only are caregivers stretched seriously thin when it comes to providing basic standards of care, but post-acute care is among the most regulated industries in the country, and caregivers are saddled with regulatory and administrative burdens that far exceed the requirements faced in other clinical settings. “There is regulation surrounding how everything is done in these settings,” says Meghan. “And it’s significant. I’d say 30-40% of our nurses’ time is spent documenting.”

Enter Intelligent Automation

But long-term caregivers and nurses didn’t enter the profession to document. “You’re taking care of people for sometimes years, and you’re a subset of their family,” explains Meghan. “In a hospital setting, patients are in and out. Then caregivers are on to the next person. In long-term care, this is not the case. And it’s what keeps people in this setting—because we make these relationships.” By outsourcing meal delivery or socialization, “there really isn’t any reason for people to want to be in long-term care,” Meghan adds.

Instead, long-term care facilities must focus on relieving weary staff from draining and repetitive tasks like documentation, transferring electronic health records from acute care to post-acute care facility, and other regulatory administrative burdens. “At this point,” says Meghan, “we need intelligent automation to keep nurses and clinical staff afloat. We need to make taking care of those 14 patients as feasible as possible.”

Meghan offers a simple math problem: if you have five nurses on a rehab floor, and you save two hours a day by automating an administrative duty, that’s 10 hours. “That can free up your nurse to be a nurse,” she says.

To talk to Meghan about the power of automation in post-acute care settings, click here to get in touch.