As a nurse practicing at the bedside pre-pandemic, I saw the potential for technology to improve health care. From my vantage point, however, even the most promising tools were insufficient to address the greatest safety, quality, and efficiency challenges in patient care. Additionally, they did little to relieve burdens on caregivers.
Advances in technology have especially underserved senior living communities. Operators still don’t have the right data or visibility into the care that takes place in their communities. Many new digital tools require manual, ad hoc data entry, resulting in data that can be unreliable. And single-use tools like fall detection devices dump data into fragmented systems that don’t talk to each other.
As a result, operators garner few actionable, scalable, or proactive insights to improve care. At the same time, they’re obligated to invest significant resources up front for implementation plans and infrastructure changes. Clinicians like me get burned out by new layers of documentation requirements, and lower-touch solutions like wearables are not always practical for seniors. Much technology simply fails to meet senior living communities where they are.
An intelligent operating system for resident care
I founded Inspiren to address these challenges and bring front-line clinical experience to bear. Our team designed a new platform from the ground up — an intelligent operating system for resident care — that provides a complete view of the resident environment and actionable insights to help guide decisions.
The star of the Inspiren platform is AUGi, a single device about the size of a wall clock. It combines cutting-edge technologies to collect better, more accurate data, but is fast and easy to install. Plug it into the wall in a resident room, and you immediately start capturing resident and staff behavior data. Add Smart Lanyards that staff wear on their badge, and you can see when and for how long they’re with each resident. Care teams can access dashboards, live views of resident rooms that are de-identified to protect privacy, and more on both mobile and web apps. Under the hood, our engineers built advanced computer vision models and artificial intelligence pipelines that drive insights and alerts.
Inspiren’s intelligent operating system has been utilized with great success in acute care settings, and now we’re excited to bring it to senior living. It’s an extension of care teams that offers an extra layer of oversight.
But while many similar tools aim solely to improve certain clinical outcomes, our AI platform provides more comprehensive value, sitting at the convergence of resident safety, workforce efficiency, and revenue accuracy.
For example, Inspiren surfaces reliable, objective data that reflect the true care levels of residents and the work staff are doing with them, in real time. This enables operators to (1) bill accurately for services, (2) staff care teams appropriately, and (3) more efficiently allocate care to the residents who need it most.
Inspiren’s Event Analyzer captures in-room events for care teams
Improving resident safety
Inspiren offers the only hybrid sensing technology fusing staff data with resident activity data to drive predictive analytics for clinical risk management.
Our dashboards identify clinically meaningful events; support data-driven care planning, such as prioritized rounding and triage; and empower care teams to make better, more proactive care decisions. Our AI alerts not only detect falls — they prevent them.
Communities using Inspiren see, on average, a 50% decrease in falls with injury and a 45% increase in safety protocol compliance.
CareOne Paramus, a premier senior living community in New Jersey, turned to Inspiren in 2023 to reduce resident falls. Over a period of four months, caregivers leveraged the Inspiren system to improve their workflows, resulting in an estimated 100 timely interventions under 3 minutes, including proactive alerts, and an 80% reduction in falls with injury. Care teams could easily view resident behavioral data for care planning and ADL assessments. Our event review feature eliminated unwitnessed events and enabled leaders to create new incident response training for staff.
According to Risa, the Senior Executive Director at CareOne Paramus, the community ended up receiving requests from residents who wanted to move into the neighborhood where AUGi was installed in the rooms.
Enhancing workforce efficiency
Inspiren’s AI platform streamlines caregiver workflow to save staff time and energy, reducing burden and burnout.
AUGi collects data passively, which allows staff to refocus their effort back at the bedside, not in EMRs. Dashboards surface data for triage and prioritizing tasks. Virtual rounding and safety checks save time from going door to door, while analytics help “load balance” staff so they’re not over- or under-worked, and they’re staffed properly across floors and buildings.
Palm Garden in Gainesville, Florida, installed Inspiren’s platform in 2021 to provide safer, more efficient resident care at existing staffing levels. Remote sitters were able to use de-identified live views of resident rooms on their mobile devices, enabling operators to monitor high-risk residents without having to beef up care teams with more full-time employees or compromise resident privacy.
“We used to need 25 employees to monitor all our residents one-on-one,” said Kala Fuhrmann, Palm Garden’s executive director. “An AUGi in each room provides that one-on-one service.”
Ensuring revenue accuracy
Inspiren is the only resident care platform that identifies opportunities to increase revenue capture for services.
Billing, for example, is traditionally determined by care levels that providers subjectively assess and record in clinical notes. As a result, based on interviews with community leaders across the industry, we estimate that operators under-assess 25-30% of their residents’ levels of care.
Communities using Inspiren, however, update care plans more frequently with objective, reliable data collected passively by AUGi. Operators can see decision-grade insights that accurately reflect the care that their staff are providing to each resident.
In 2023, Inspiren worked with a memory care center in California with two pricing tiers. Based on our data, the operator developed four new tiers to reflect the true amount of care each resident needed and received, and to staff each floor appropriately. This improved the quality of care, and operators saw a 10% increase in revenue — a win-win for care communities and residents alike.
Inspiren is forging a new path for senior care
Health care has been abuzz recently with talk of AI. At Inspiren, we have a 5-year head start on the industry, and senior living communities are uniquely positioned to take advantage of what we’ve learned and built.
Our AI platform doesn’t make decisions for you. Instead, it gives you data that make your decisions more informed, intuitive, and impactful. It augments your care teams, gives families peace of mind, and improves clinical outcomes, operational performance, and profitability.
We’re forging a new path and setting a higher standard of care for senior living communities and the residents they serve. We look forward to supporting and guiding you on this journey.
Michael Wang is the Founder & Chief Clinical Officer of Inspiren, a senior living and healthcare technology company. He is dually licensed as a registered nurse and as an advanced practice clinician with vast experience in cardiothoracic surgery and direct patient care. He received a bachelor’s degree from Emory University and advanced degrees from Columbia University.