When Home Care Aide David Birmingham noticed a rash forming on his consumer’s leg, he opened up a new mobile application on his tablet to send a photo to his supervisor and asked for advice. Birmingham and his consumer are leading the way in testing how technology can become part of the consumer’s care plan.
From Lazy Susans to food processors to patient lifts, Home Care Aides make use of all kinds of technology in the work they do for their consumers.
SEIU 775 Benefits Group is testing a series of mobile applications for smartphones and tablets that help caregivers maintain and monitor the health of their consumers. These apps are currently being tested by HCAs and consumers before they become widely available.
Birmingham, an HCA with the agency ResCare, was selected to work on an early version of an app that allows caregivers to monitor and report changes to the health of their consumer. The agency then sees a full health report, Birmingham says. “The app is a series of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions which caregivers can answer, or which the consumer can answer. Things like ‘Is the consumer eating more or less today than other days?’”
Birmingham believes the app’s simplicity is part of its genius. “These questions help to record baseline, and deviations from baseline,” Birmingham says.
“Sometimes you’re not capturing anything except that the consumer is stable. But if you start answering ‘yes’ to certain questions, you can add observations about what the client has been experiencing. This gives us a clear, quantifiable way to capture and report information about the state of a consumer.”
Variations in a consumer’s health can go unnoticed, and it’s difficult to stop problems at their source. The app that SEIU 775 Benefits Group is testing allows caregivers to compile an accurate and reliable record.
Home Care Aide David Birmingham, right, asks his consumer, Luther Stone, a series of health questions on a tablet device. The questions can be logged daily and, in the future, shared with a supervisor and the consumer’s Primary Care Provider. (Photos by Paul Joseph Brown)
In addition to allowing HCAs to report written information to agencies and health care providers, the app also includes a feature that lets them take and send pictures of potential health conditions to get guidance from a clinician before it gets out of hand.
“As somebody who hates paperwork,” Birmingham says, “the ability to automate is very valuable. I appreciate technology that has a human face.”
It would be hard to imagine a more personal line of work than caregiving. But the very intimacy of the day-to-day work of caregiving is exactly what makes it so difficult to document for HCAs, consumers, agencies, and health care providers.
Sahar Banijamali, SEIU 775 Benefits Group developer and organizer of the technology pilots, says, “Home care work is often in a silo. There needs to be a formal pathway for sharing important observations from HCAs with the primary care team.”
Banijamali says these apps can provide early detection of changes in a consumer’s health and prevent future health issues.
Si-Chi Chin, a SEIU 775 Benefits Group researcher working with Banijamali on the tech pilots, says, “HCAs find that just asking questions of consumers adds value to the work of being a caregiver. They feel they can contact supervisors with more structured information. They have a technology and a form that allows them to say ‘I notice a rash, this is concerning.’”
New technology always takes some time to perfect through trial and error. It was not long ago that digital care plans, connecting consumers with family members via Skype, and nutrition apps were not widely used. Today, they are regular tools in the lives of many HCAs and consumers.
Birmingham says that the technology he has helped test in the real world has a bright future, one that depends, like any tool, on the needs of HCAs and consumers.
“This is a great tool,” he says. “But nothing more than a tool. It can increase client safety and well-being when used correctly. It even adds a sense of professionalism. This is just the tip of the iceberg. However, technology will always be an extension of the caregiver who makes it work.”
