ChatGPT in Senior Living? How Communities Can Use AI to Save Time and Improve Quality of Care

Hear that? It’s either electric sheep bleating in the distance or it’s the sound of millions of people typing out ChatGPT prompts. Or maybe it’s both. Regardless, here’s what you need to know: AI has exploded in popularity since OpenAI released its flagship product, ChatGPT, last December.

In that time, ChatGPT hasn’t just become a nifty tool for individual employees; it’s also become a focus at the enterprise level. For product development. For marketing strategy. For nearly everything that defines a business. And the senior living industry isn’t any different. In fact, the most tech-forward communities have already started wrapping AI into their current and future plans.

In this blog, we outline what ChatGPT’s capabilities are, how senior living communities can harness the power of AI, and how Icon leverages ChatGPT to save time for staff and improve the senior living experience.

Background: What Is ChatGPT?

According to its creators, ChatGPT is a language model designed to interact with users and…

• Answer initial and follow-up queries.
• Admit its mistakes.
• Challenge incorrect premises.
• Reject inappropriate requests.

The “chat” portion of ChatGPT comes from the way users interact with the tool – by typing questions and observations into the search bar. Users send a prompt. ChatGPT “chats” back with a reply. That interaction continues until users either get the answer they were looking for or realize they need to look elsewhere for it.

There are plenty of articles detailing ChatGPT prompting, and we won’t delve into it for any reason other than to say: if you want to use ChatGPT properly, it’s worth learning how it processes information. The more precise the prompt, the better the odds you’ll get the answer you’re looking for.

3 Ways AI & ChatGPT Can Improve Your Community’s Senior Living Experience

At a high level, ChatGPT – and AI more broadly – help communities by automating tasks that might otherwise have fallen on a staff that’s been stretched thin by labor shortages. More specifically, we’re seeing AI and ChatGPT help in these three ways.

1. Automate time-consuming administrative tasks

Whether it’s creating emergency communication templates, copyediting marketing collateral, or translating mountains of data, senior living staff have a lot of work on their plates – work that doesn’t directly involve engaging with residents. We’ve previously covered how technology can free up staff workloads and give your teams more time to speak with residents and their families. AI is no exception.

Ideally your senior living technology platforms already simplify some of this work (like tracking activity supplies or building event attendance reports). But if you don’t have a robust system that already, say, tracks resident event attendance, family satisfaction scores, and tech adoption rates, ChatGPT can help you see takeaways in the data you have. (Here’s a helpful how-to guide for using ChatGPT to understand your data.)

2. Monitor resident health and wellness

If you have a telehealth platform that integrates data from RPM devices, then congratulations – you’re probably already using AI. In fact, health monitoring is one of the more common use cases for AI today. But how does it work?

Let’s say a resident wears an Apple Watch that can track vital signs like heart rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygen levels. The resident recently integrated the watch with their community’s existing medical platforms (EHRs, eMARs, chronic care management platforms, etc.). As a result, those systems can track vitals from the watch and send alerts when those biometric measurements deviate from the norm.

The result: a better senior living experience with round-the-clock attention on resident health.

3. Provide 24 / 7 assistance to residents and their families

ChatGPT can perform a lot of tasks. But it’s still a chatbot at the end of the day. So try using it as a virtual assistant. You might have caregivers working around the clock, but it’s unlikely that the number of onsite staff members stays the same from morning to night. Your off-business hours are when a chatbot comes in most handy.

Maybe it’s later in the evening and a resident’s family has questions about your life enrichment program or activities calendar. Rather than potentially waiting until the morning to hear back from staff, loved ones can use a chatbot to get answers right away. And so can your residents.

Lots of older adults use voice assistant devices, like Amazon Alexa, to independently check community announcements. A chatbot works in a similar way. But you can make it accessible to residents and their families.

How Icon’s AI-Based Template Generation Helps You Simplify Communication

We’re pleased to announce a new capability for communities that use Communication 360. Powered by ChatGPT, our smart template generation feature allows staff users to auto-fill content for their broadcast messages (based on the template name and brief description) rather than having to write everything from scratch themselves.

ChatGPT will generate three templated options. Staff can then select the option they want to use and make any tweaks to the phrasing that they’d like.

What impact does this have in the day to day? It aligns with the broader benefit of using AI: it saves time. Your team doesn’t need to spend hours coming up with precise wording for standardized messages they plan on sending to your community members (residents, staff, and family). They get to take on the role of editor.

Put simply, ChatGPT does the “grunt work” for you.

As the first senior living technology provider to bring this type of feature to the market, we can’t wait to see how our partners use this tool – and how we can iterate upon it to deepen its value. (For more product updates like this one, subscribe to our newsletter!)

ChatGPT Is Just One Tool in Your Senior Living Technology Toolbelt

We get it. ChatGPT is all the rage right now (we’re writing about it, after all). But it’s important to remember that 1) AI can’t do everything and 2) ChatGPT isn’t a substitute for engagement platforms or integrated communication tools. For now, technology like ChatGPT is additive – supplementary.

Remember, too, that while older adults are growing more tech-fluent, AI is fairly new ground for almost everybody. Even the tech-savviest folks need time to learn new platforms and systems. And learning is just the first step. It takes even longer to properly deploy technology for a wider audience.Interested in seeing how Icon can help you simplify workflows and improve the senior living experience – both with and without AI? Book a demo and see the ways senior living technology can work for you.