Adrian Schauer

CEO and Founder of AlayaCare

However, there is a solution to prevent our Quebec healthcare system from becoming too hospital-centric. It’s home care. Unfortunately, this care is far from efficient in Quebec. But with the right technology, it could create a small revolution and boost network activity outside of hospitals.

Reading the conclusions of the second volume of the Health and Welfare Commissioner’s report, released this week, looking at home care performance in Quebec, it is clear that a specific plan is needed to respond to the 20,562 people who is currently awaiting her first home care service in the province. With the aging of the population, the demand for home care is increasing significantly every year and we need to improve and optimize home care across the province starting this year.

reduce hospital stays

First, everyone agrees that home care is a desire of the majority of stay-at-home seniors and is the future of healthcare, both here and around the world. In all the countries where my company operates, the authorities are realigning the organization of their health care to promote care and support directly at the patient’s location. This reduces hospitalizations and avoids hospital repatriations while increasing hospital capacity for cases where it is really needed.

Despite Quebec’s desire to follow this path and continue to develop the provision of home care, we note that the current organization has major shortcomings and struggles to meet all needs.

The Health and Welfare Commissioner notes in particular that:

• “User intervention profiles vary greatly from territory to territory.”
• “Most interventions focus on a few people; Thus, 10% of those in need of home care receive 70% of the interventions.”
• “The proportion of hours worked in direct contact with the user is low in professional services and in care, namely 25% and 32%, respectively.”

We therefore conclude that the province does not have an equivalent offer from one region to another and has difficulties in meeting the needs of all patients. For what ? This is because the legacy systems in place require caregivers to spend far too much time filling out administrative paperwork instead of providing care.

Change

Home care is ripe for the age of technology and smart data. Imagine a platform powered by artificial intelligence that allows you to optimize caregiver schedules by maximizing their daily journey, match patient needs with the right caregivers, ensure all visit documentation right on this platform, but also to extract real-time data managing all home care visits across Quebec.

This technology exists and is being used in other jurisdictions in Canada and elsewhere in the world, and by most home care businesses in the country. By expanding across the province, Quebec will be able to develop a reliable home care strategy that creates care capacity to immediately tackle the long waiting list, while also supporting hospitals in their efforts to keep patients in a safe and bring home in a monitored environment.

The country’s other provinces have long since made the transition to home care. What are we waiting for to start our own national modernization process? What are we waiting for to automate the administrative and repetitive tasks of caregivers and enable them to increase their home visits? Shouldn’t we put an end to their unnecessary travel by concentrating all their medical records in one place? These are simple solutions that ultimately allow every patient to stay at home as long as they want.

In a context of labor shortages, where every resource is precious, we take care of our professionals and their working conditions by strengthening their role at home.

It is possible to humanize home care through technology and data. Why not enjoy it here too?