Will the era of AI-based health IT solutions lead to more co-development efforts between tech vendors and health system customers? Here is one example: PointClickCare, whose cloud-based EHR platform is built for the long-term and post-acute care (LTPAC) market, has entered into a product co-development arrangement with The Springs Living, a senior living operator serving older adults in Oregon, Montana, and Washington.
Healthcare Innovation spoke with Brenda Connelly, president of The Springs Living, and Dave Wessinger, co-founder and CEO of PointClickCare, about the arrangement.
Healthcare Innovation: Earlier this year I interviewed David Pessis, PointClickCare’s chief product and technology officer, who gave us a good idea of your solution direction. I read that this marks PointClickCare’s first direct co-development relationship with a senior living operator. What is the perceived value in working this closely together on building a product?
Connelly: What we experience is that often technology is developed and created in a vacuum. It is built away from the people who use it every day, all with great intentions, but ultimately what Dave and I and our teams knew is that until we could truly bring the two together, we weren’t going to be able to create an interconnected, fully optimized solution for our teams. This comes at a unique time for us at The Springs Living, as we just announced a partnership with SCAN Health Plan to launch a Medicare Advantage plan on January 1. We’re in open enrollment right now, so we needed a next-generation solution for our EHR to connect our clinicians, our front-line teams, and everyone. Even though we’re 10-year vendor partners with PointClickCare, we decided that what Dave and his team were committed to building with us was so important that we needed to go into this all the way.
HCI: This is quite a commitment of time and effort on your team’s part to be involved in that co-creation, right?
Connelly: Absolutely. I mean, the commitment of time is not just at an executive or leadership team level. This extends all the way through to our front-line teams. For the past three to four weeks, we’ve had PointClickCare product team members and account reps working right alongside our front-line staff, and their voices are being heard as to what matters most in terms of the work streams and how we support this new model of caring for our residents. That also extends to our clinician group.
HCI: Dave, from your perspective, why is this arrangement attractive to PointClickCare now?
Wessinger: The big difference I would say from the technology side is we have an ability to leverage technology in a way we haven’t been able to do in the last 15 years. We can add value in a way we haven’t been able to add value that moves Brenda and her team forward differently than we’ve ever been able to power them. That is the AI-native concept.
We have the technology, the data, the capability, the capital, and the people. Now let’s get close to the workflow. And what we used to do in years we’re doing in weeks and days now.
HCI: I was going to ask if now you’re seeing a sped up product development cycle?
Wessinger: That was our commitment to each other. We can’t do this with a traditional mindset where we show up, ask questions, write it down, and months later show up with something, and the customer says that’s not what we asked for. The new model is build with us. Show us what you’re going to build before you build it. Validating that with end-users takes some time, but once you have that discovery done well, you can do the expensive part a lot faster, and that’s engineers involved in building the thing and getting it right for them.
HCI: Does this involve ambient AI and and agents? Could you give some examples of of how you envision that helping?
Wessinger: Today all of the data that arrives is generally through a human, but if you think about that starting to come through sensors, through ambient, through other capabilities, you’re going to have this rich data set that we’re now leveraging AI to act on and agents do some of that work. For instance, our Community Advisor product just landed, and The Springs is working through that with us in terms of understanding the community: who’s at risk, who’s not, and what do we need to do about it? Those kind of things land in a visual that allows us to act on them as humans differently than when we had to go find the data and pull it all together to get that community view and that enterprise view.
HCI: Are there AI tools that focus on things like coding, billing, and quality reporting?
Wessinger: The most challenging thing, I think, is going after clinical decision support-type tooling. But the greatest opportunities are the administrative type workload on clinicians or on the rest of the staff. If the humans are not adding a lot of value and it’s kind of a nuisance to their work, we should eliminate that and let them move to higher value work. I think that’s how we mutually think about it. There are lots of things for humans to do, and there are lots of things that AI can alleviate.
HCI: Brenda, do you have some things that are high priority that your team is hoping this co-development can really help you with?
Connelly: As an industry, we know that we have way more older adults that we need to care for than we have staff available to care for them. What is going to help with filling that gap is technology solutions. It is about automating workflows and getting the information right to the clinician or right to the nurse, and it doesn’t take human to human to human to transfer it, because that’s where things get lost.
Along with that, PointClickCare also understands that within our value-based care plan we are taking on shared risk. So we need a rich and robust data set to be able to draw on for looking at comorbidities and the challenges that could exist, and then be able to illuminate what action steps need to be taken and at what point, so that we can notice issues that present to us as a pebble vs. when they get to be a boulder. We are working through: What is the user experience on behalf of the teams and the communities? How do we connect the dots? And what things have to be elevated when? It’s been really fascinating to watch the process as it unfolds. The iteration process and how quickly this is happening is mind-blowing to me.
HCI: When we talk to big hospital systems about AI deployments, sometimes we hear pushback from nurses who feel like this is being dropped on them without their involvement in the development, so it is interesting to hear you talk about involving the front-line staff in thinking through product development.
Wessinger: I think if ideas start from the outside and try to find their way in, you’re going to struggle to get the level of trust and adoption you want. But if the ideas start on the inside and you support the team and what their needs are, you find the innovations that will land. To wake up and ask what happened last night and what should I be aware of before I get my day started? If I don’t have to search for information that’s in various places, I can actually start my day focused on the things that matter. Now, those ideas didn’t come from us. Those are team saying what it wants to be more effective, and how do we support them in that? That changed the entire dynamic of how technology can be adopted and trusted, because it starts with them. It was designed for them, and it helps them.
Connelly: I started in this industry back at the age of 16 as a caregiver, front-line worker in the nursing home. I have been very aware that to gain consensus and buy-in, you have to involve the teams in the communities. Otherwise, it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s just something that somebody else built. Our teams are hungry for this. We’ve given developers feedback before but it has never been as integrated as this. Our teams are so energized to be able to contribute not just to something that’s going to impact us at The Springs Living; we really believe that this is going to be able to impact our industry as a whole in shaping the way we serve older adults across the nation.