Uniting uses GenAI to cut admin burden for frontline care workers

Uniting NSW.ACT, has developed a new digital front door to provide carers with mobile access to essential enterprise systems on the go.

Andrew Dome, Uniting

Built with the Azure OpenAI Service, the ‘Buddy’ application uses generative AI to streamline administrative tasks for care workers, such as recording in-home visits and accessing internal policy information.

Employees can also access Uniting’s intranet and enterprise systems, such as human resources and payroll - tasks that previously required logging in from a company centre.

Speaking at Gartner IT Symposium on the Gold Coast, Uniting chief information officer Andrew Dome said that "he main driver for Buddy right now is taking away 15-to-20-minute transactions [from employees], removing that administration and making them one-to-two-minute activities.

“That builds 15 minutes back into a day," he said.

"We’re removing as much of the administrative burden from our employees so that they can look after our customers and spend more time with them.”

Uniting specialises in residential and community care and currently has a customer base of 160,000, including 118,000 who receive care in their homes.

The provider began developing Buddy last year after being approached by Microsoft, which was seeking care providers that were “ready to go on the generative AI journey”.

“We put our hand up and thankfully Uniting has some pretty stable foundational platforms, which enabled us to innovate and do some pretty cool, interesting things,” Dome said.

Over a period of 12 months, Uniting began developing Buddy with Microsoft partner HSO, which built the enterprise infrastructure and architecture for the application on Azure.

In tandem, Uniting began working on its first genAI case study – improving employees’ access to Uniting’s policies and procedures.

“When we first decided on our first use case, we decided we wanted a low-risk use case where we knew the data,” said Dome.

“We’re not sharing it out of our ecosystem; we weren’t bringing any data from an ecosystem outside of United. It was publicly available policies of procedures on our intranet site. The problem was that nobody knew where [the policies] were.”

Using Buddy, employees can access policy and procedure information from SharePoint, alongside scenario-based instructions, using a chatbot interface.

The app also comes with voice-to-text transcription of case notes from care workers’ home visits.

“Typically, what [care workers] had to do previously was – when they had finished the call, go to a Uniting centre, log on to the desktop machine kiosk, go into the clinical system and type down [the call notes],” said Dome.

"That really was a 15-to-20-minute activity, plus the driving time to get to a Uniting site. They no longer need to do that.”

Now, workers are able to verbally record notes into their smartphones, which are transcribed and summarised in the Buddy application.

Validated case notes are then integrated into Uniting’s external care management system.

According to Dome, Uniting currently has 9000 employees who see between five-to-six clients a day.

“[Using Buddy] is now returning between one hour and two hours back in their day, and with that time, they're now spending more time with our customers," he said.

"That's the goal: spend more time providing quality care with our customers during the day.”

Eleanor Dickinson attended Gartner IT Symposium on the Gold Coast as a guest of Gartner.