AI’s role in aged care is increasingly significant, with software vendors launching Lookout Assist – Powering the next horizon in home care – a tool designed to mitigate the escalating administrative pressures on home care providers.
The Lookout Way has rolled out a substantial upgrade to its home care management platform, which features specialized AI-driven agents referred to as Lookout Assist.
Specifically developed for the Australian aged care sector, Lookout Assist AI agents aim to support workers, clinicians, care managers, rostering teams, finance teams, clients, and families in alleviating the administrative workload that has come with stricter compliance regulations.
Lookout Assist is directly integrated into workflows where providers experience the most challenges, with agents concentrating on fulfilling designated tasks. Nonetheless, human involvement is always present, and a complete audit trail is available for each action, as stated by the software vendor.
Lookout Assist agents are constructed upon six fundamental control points established by Lookout:
- A human is consistently available to guide and intervene.
- Validation of inputs is performed.
- Prompts are thoroughly tested and secured.
- Tools are confined to an authorized set.
- Outputs are meticulously reviewed.
- Every action is recorded for compliance and continuous enhancement.
Launched on June 1, Lookout Assist incorporated preconfigured agents for the creation of care plans utilizing external clinician documents, clinical summaries, connected care handover summaries, clinical suggestions, worker availability, and support for multiple languages.
The Clinical Pathways agent delivers integrated clinical governance for high-acuity care, utilizing 31 evidence-based clinical assessments that align with the reinforced Aged Care Quality Standards, including the Abbey Pain Scale and the Waterlow Pressure Injury Risk Scale.
The Lookout Way states that this allows care plans to evolve into dynamic clinical timelines that develop through assessments, observations, and external clinician documents, rather than being static PDFs.
The Connected Care agent ensures that providers receive verified confirmation of service delivery for every service, including those provided by third-party services. It also offers secure checkout notes that can be shared with clients and their families. Lookout Assist powered handover summaries support suppliers by providing automated risk assessments of supplier notes.
Plans are underway for Connected Care to incorporate single shared vendor profiles that will facilitate discovery and booking, as well as shared vendor rate cards to promote pricing standardization and enhance accountability. Concurrently, the Vision Rostering agent is designed to gradually transition providers towards proactive workforce planning. The worker availability feature transforms free-text updates from casual staff into clear approval decisions, leveraging constraints and historical behavior.
Future capabilities are set to include Lookout Assist-powered automated break management and the handling of vacant visits. The Lookout Assist release will also feature enterprise-grade Role-Based Access Control, which includes override capabilities, curated templates aligned with common provider use cases, detailed ticket category permissions for incident, finance, human resources, and compliance teams, and projected balances in the client application.