Senior living has experienced staffing shortages recently and is embracing artificial intelligence as a way to help solve them. AI is being cited as one of the keys to helping with healthcare’s continued staffing shortage, according to a report by consulting company Kaufman Hall.
Senior living operators can learn much from the report, which found that the increased use of contracted workers helped fuel a 20% growth in labor expenses in the healthcare system from March 2022 to March 2023. Healthcare organizations now spend 91% more on contracted labor than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic, research showed. Additionally, health systems spent 27% more from March 2022 to March 2023 on talent acquisition efforts compared to pre-pandemic levels.
“That workforce shortage is the primary challenge,” Erik Swanson, a senior vice president with Kaufman Hall’s data analytics department told Fierce Healthcare. “And one way that that workforce shortage is being addressed is the reliance on some of this very expensive type of labor.”
AI could help provide relief, however, he said, with administrative work, such as billing, already being done digitally, he said. ChatGPT and other large language models help with charting, taking notes and filling out forms. A recent study estimated that 40% of healthcare working hours could be augmented by using AI. Forty-two percent of companies want to make a large investment in ChatGPT in 2023, and half of healthcare organizations plan to use ChatGPT for learning purposes, with more than half planning pilot cases this year, the report said.
AI chats actually were found to be more empathetic than doctors’ responses to patients’ questions, one study shows. In their study, researchers from the University of California–San Diego found that healthcare professionals preferred ChatGPT’s responses 79% of the time over physician’s responses, rating the ChatGPT’s responses as higher-quality and more empathetic.
