By Susan Saldibar

Back when my mom became ill very quickly, all of us were left scratching our heads wondering why we didn’t see it coming.

She was 94 and had been razor sharp and healthy all her life, almost up to the end. But that last week was pretty rough. Looking back at it, there must have been signs that all was not well. But they were lost on us kids who lacked the experience to put the puzzle pieces together.

So I can’t help but wonder, after listening to Foresight’s recent Tech Tuesday, if Fynn’s groundbreaking predictive analytics platform would have made a difference …

or maybe even saved her life?

More about the platform in a minute. Here are a couple of people you need to listen to.

Tod Petty is chief marketing officer for Fynn (a Foresight partner), and Donna Moore is general manager at Holbrook Life, a senior living community in Georgia. Todd and Donna chatted with Abbie about a number of issues and innovations impacting our industry.

Tod and Donna are friends as well as colleagues, so there was some lively repartee, along with valuable insights shared about the shift towards value-based care and how loving your residents is also good for business. Here are two that stand out:

  1. Technology must stop looking backward. Most technology looks backward to what has already happened. Now we have machine learning to intervene before an episodic event happens. Most people are historians, reporting what’s happening right now. Technology can tell us what is going to happen.
  2. Predictive analytics is a game changer.

Let’s talk about #2 because using predictive analytics to proactively care for residents is what Fynn is all about. And most communities aren’t doing it.

What if, instead of a hospital visit, your resident — let’s call her Mary — could be healed through on-site rehab? 

Consider this:

  • Before Mary has an issue, machine learning (through the Fynn platform) can be applied to collected data, using predictive analytics to push an alarm to inform your caregivers what should be done to help keep Mary healthy.
  • How would it benefit your community for Mary to spend a day or two in rehab instead of going for a hospital stay?
  • And, according to Tod, the government will pay for you to triage these symptoms and monitor them with a health care professional.

Maybe it’s time to stop thinking of AI as a job killer.

One thing both Tod and Donna agree on is that AI and predictive analytics can never replace people. People are the heart of your community. But you want them doing what they were hired to do. As Tod noted, AI uses predictive analytics to empower the caregiver to proactively care for the resident. That can make a huge difference in the quality of life for that resident.

Wouldn’t you want this for your own mom or dad?

Just as in the case of my own mom, each critical health emergency has a journey that leads up to it. And much of that journey consists of small steps that sit in the heads of your CNAs or other caregivers. And they go unrecorded.

I’ll never know for sure what having the Fynn platform would have done to keep my mom’s health together at least a bit longer. But I do know that if she had been in a community that had Fynn, those steps leading up to her hospitalization would have been more apparent. They would have been recorded. They would have been analyzed. And steps could have been taken proactively.

Knowing this would make me feel a whole lot better.

And I think that says a lot.

Learn more about Fynn — and get a demo — here.