St Vincent's Care Services eyes “small scale” AI use cases

St Vincent's Care Services is in the exploration stages of potential AI use cases with possible applications identified within its finance operations.

The organisation provides services across retirement living, home and aged care with locations around Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.

Jane Clarkson, consumer care manager at St Vincent's Care Services said there is “lots to talk about AI” regarding the various directions an organisation can take.

“There might be finding value on a small scale with solving some of our financial core problems, particularly with our next-of-kin [clients] who are never available during the business hours that we want to call.”

Clarkson added a better way to interact with clients could be another area where AI is applied as the organisation often faces resistance from clients responding to emails and voicemails.

“That's probably more of an opportunity to go back and think about because there is such an obvious gap in the translation”.

Speaking at a recent Genesys Xperience Sydney, Clarkson said as people returned to the office following the health pandemic suddenly everything in the background was really messy, nobody could figure out where everything was gone, and someone had to fix it”.

“That gifted us the opportunity to jump into Genesys. It had already been approved in St. Vincent's Health Australia, with our drug and alcohol call centre. That hard work was done.

“We just had to put together a business case to bring my team, which is the contact centre that sits across mostly aged care but we work a bit with the hospitals as well and also our accounts team”.

Clarkson said since the company has been on the platform, “two or three” crisis hotlines were able to be created and answered by agents “within a couple of hours”.

From its work, Clarkson added under the new system, users can resolve tasks without the need to seek further help.

“Making sure people understand what technology today gives the user and empowers the user to control in their hand because our IT help desk doesn't want us ringing up every time we want to add another user or change a schedule or put a queue together.”

Clarkson added there are some within the organisation “who just have that drive to self-service”.

“They're starting to learn what they can do and what they can control and when we talk about the employee experience, we've got this little micro users group now that's organically happening and we've got people in teams that have never spoken to each other before.”

Clarkson said these groups are now able to assist each other more easily.   

“It's important to empower people to do as much as they can before they seek technical help because then you've got a solution in two minutes rather than two weeks.”