Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software tools have huge potential for the senior living industry. It can help monitor vital signs and health indicators, as well as administrative and marketing tasks. Yet, many facilities are still wary of using these tools, especially when it comes to marketing.
However, the reality is that many senior living facilities are beginning to use the technology and see significant benefits in improving care, assisting with administrative functions, and even increasing the impact of their marketing campaigns. According to a recent survey, while only 9% of operators say they are currently using AI tools, 34% say they plan to do so in the near future. When it comes to marketing tasks, 36% of senior living executives surveyed felt that AI-aided technology would play a key role in differentiating their organization from competitors.
To help determine whether AI is right for your facility, let’s examine the pros and cons of using AI-assisted software tools to market to new residents and improve the patient experience.
The pros and cons of AI for senior living facilities
Senior living facilities that choose to implement AI tools in safe and appropriate ways to help with their marketing, resident, and patient service efforts can reap many benefits. A recent survey conducted by Aging and Health Technology Watch identified the current benefits of early adopters of AI, including saving hours of time on administrative tasks to free up time for care, better assessing hospital referrals and resourcing options, quicker and more specific fall detections, faster alerting of staff to medication-related health issues, and access to more comprehensive information to guide staff interventions.
So, what’s holding your facility back from adding new AI tools at your senior living facilities? Let’s take a look at common concerns.
While only 9% of senior living operators say they are currently using AI tools, 34% say they plan to do so soon, with the goal of improving their administrative processes, patient care, and business development efficiency.
Source: 2024 Report: The state of senior living and technology
Con #1: Data security and privacy concerns
Let's address one of the biggest concerns about AI and senior care first. To maintain HIPAA compliance, senior living facilities must follow all privacy and security regulations related to residents' protected health information (PHI). Therefore, concerns about whether AI tools can be used to support HIPAA compliance are valid. In addition, there are also huge concerns about the open-source nature of popular GenAI models, which means sensitive operational or resident data could be exposed to competitors or even hackers.
Pro #1: AI tools can help you get more value from your data, securely
At CallRail, our tools have been developed with an understanding of how important it is for care providers to keep PHI secure. This is why we have integrated the solutions with healthcare privacy platforms like Freshpaint. The result is a software solution that can help bridge the gap between your resident’s medical privacy and your digital marketing.
In addition, our secure Healthcare Plan for the senior care industry automatically redacts sensitive patient-protected health information from call transcripts, enforces obligatory log-outs to prevent PHI from becoming public, provides full audit trail logging, and even features unique logins and credentials for every user, which helps eliminate the potential for PHI to be accidentally exposed to employees who don’t need access to that information.
Con #2: AI is a machine
Having a personalized experience is important to almost all residents and resident families. According to a 2023 consumer demand survey, satisfaction with care facilities increased when family members felt they had easy access to those operating the facility where their loved one was being cared for. Yet less than half, or 48% of facilities were able to provide personalized responses from facility leadership to customers. Given these concerns, handing over content creation or customer interactions to AI can feel daunting. While an AI-powered chatbot might be more efficient than a human in a call center, you also don’t want residents or their families to feel like you’ve delegated customer service to a robot. Trust is the key to building relationships.
According to a recent consumer demand survey, most families (75%) still prefer to connect with senior living facilities over the phone before making a final decision.
Pro #2: AI can improve the experience of your residents and their families
Worries over AI making resident and family interactions feel impersonal are reasonable, but just like any other type of tool, it’s how you use AI that matters. There are ways to deploy AI that can enhance the resident and caregiver experience, and by doing so, give your facility an advantage over your competitors.
CallRail’s AI-powered Premium Conversation Intelligence™ transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes each call. This allows you to quickly assess resident and caregiver needs and concerns more proactively. Rather than depersonalizing the experience, these insights will allow you to respond appropriately with a more human touch.
For instance, Premium Conversation Intelligence can identify and extract common keywords and topics from call transcripts. This data reveals recurring themes, such as frequently asked questions, common complaints, and popular services. Your senior living facility could then use these insights to tailor your marketing campaigns to address the most pressing resident and caregiver concerns.
Con #3: AI tools seem too complicated to use
Let’s face it: new technology is risky, and for understaffed senior care facilities especially, risk is scary. With AI, some risk comes from its perceived complexity. Identifying the right use cases for your facilities, selecting the right tools, training your staff, and changing workflows can all seem daunting. Figuring this out takes time and money. And, if there aren’t clear use cases and ROI attached, the long-term benefits may not be worth the short-term impact on business.
Pro #3: AI saves time and money
Using a computer or a spreadsheet for the first time probably also felt complicated – and on the front end, took some time to learn. However, you know that using these tools compared to pen, paper, and calculators has saved enormous amounts of time, making the upfront investment clearly worth it. Even if it takes some time to learn new AI tools, the time savings once you do will be worth it.
To get the greatest return on investment, focus on AI solutions that take care of time-intensive tasks to free up time for patient care. With the right use cases and tools, AI can help solve complexity without adding complexity. For example, with Premium Conversation Intelligence, CallRail customers spend 60% less time analyzing calls each week, and they’re using that time to train staff better, increase their productivity, and improve the experience for their residents and their families.
By using Premium Conversation Intelligence, facility staff can spend 60% less time analyzing calls from potential residents and caregivers each week.
Con #4: AI marketing can hurt your brand
Many leaders in the senior living industry are excited to use AI-powered software tools to accelerate creative marketing efforts, like newsletter creation and advertising. However, consumers are less excited when they encounter messaging they perceive as artificial. In fact, consumers are more likely to say that the use of AI makes them distrusting (40%), rather than trusting (19%), of a brand. In a market where trust is the most important factor for family members when choosing care providers for their loved ones, there is caution and hesitancy around using AI tools for marketing in case it results in a negative perception.
Pro #4: AI helps make your marketing better
While off-brand AI images shared on social media can be bad brand marketing, there are many ways AI can elevate your marketing efforts without impacting brand perception. From uncovering insights to improving your marketing campaigns, maximizing the value of each marketing dollar spent, and increasing lead conversion rates, AI can help you tackle these problems faster and better than ever.
At CallRail, we’re using AI tools to help senior living centers tackle the complex challenge of recruiting new residents and effectively planning their marketing efforts. Features like our multi-conversation insights give marketers instant access to a 3-6 sentence summary for each call, average call sentiment, notable trends behind positive and negative interactions, and a summary of commonly asked questions. Such analysis would take hours and hours for your marketing team to do manually, but with AI, you have call insights at your fingertips to help drive messaging and keyword decisions that can improve your marketing attribution and the resident experience.
Con #5: Adapting AI tools might cause disruption
When onboarding any new technology, there are always concerns about how well it will integrate with the existing technology and tools you use, and as always in healthcare, whether it supports HIPAA compliance. There may also be concerns about how AI tools can fit into your existing workflows without disruption.
Pro #5: AI helps people do their job better
Pairing the right AI tool for roles with repetitive tasks can be a win for your staff and your facility. For example, keeping up with senior care trends is important for marketers to improve messaging and campaigns. An AI-powered tool analyzing conversations and providing call highlights can help senior living marketers identify keyword and Google Ad opportunities, so they can focus on implementing the most successful marketing strategy, rather than listening to hours of call recordings. In addition, CallRail's new AI-powered Convert Assist helps care operators provide better service to residents and caregivers. With AI-generated call coaching, marketers can identify what went well and what to improve after every conversation.
What’s more, with a solution like CallRail, which offers a specialized plan tailored for providers in the senior living industry and signs a business associate agreement (BAA), you are assured that we support HIPAA compliance within our service offerings to ensure that your call tracking doesn’t expose you to potential fines or litigation. Moreover, we also integrate with other marketing tools, like Google Ads, GA4, and more, making it easy to integrate our solution into your existing technologies and workflows.
Experience AI that actually benefits your center with CallRail
If you’re still worried about using AI for your senior care facilities, start with a trusted solution like CallRail that has proven ROI for AI-powered tools and a commitment to responsible AI development. You can talk to CallRail’s experts or test the product for yourself with a 14-day free trial.
