Bridging In-Home Health Care Gaps in Rural Communities
Addressing rural healthcare gaps & creating efficiencies through AI.
Project Overview
Updated April 11, 2024
The Problem
Half of Canadians wait a few days for in-home health care services, while 1 in 10 wait about a month.1 In rural, geographically isolated areas with aging and at-risk populations, wait times of even 48 hours can increase hospital readmissions or prevent hospital discharge altogether – thus straining the capacity of healthcare facilities.
How We Are Solving It
Gotcare’s social enterprise-driven model and platform connects patients with both in-home and virtual care based not just on proximity, but also specialization, language and cultural understanding. This project will focus on AI-driven enhancements to Gotcare’s patient matching service; delivery of in-home healthcare and virtual support through their Health Ambassador network; and graduating their conceptual model for AI in predictive health monitoring to a fully developed, ready-for-market product.
Enhancements to the Gotcare at Home platform will refine its AI-driven algorithm for patient matching to increase precision of matches based not just on medical needs, but also cultural, linguistic and individual lifestyle factors. Their Gotcare in Community service, focused on delivery of in-home healthcare and virtual support by Health Ambassadors, will receive technical enhancements by refining generation and monitoring of individualized patient care plans. Additionally, this project will focus on taking Gotcare’s conceptual model for AI in predictive health monitoring to a fully developed product that better predicts potential adverse health events and enables faster, more efficient reporting to health teams for proactive intervention.
This project will pilot in the North Hastings region of Ontario, which currently experiences an average of 26.6 days in wait time for in-home healthcare post-hospital discharge. Delays like this disproportionately affect rural communities, particularly the thousands of patients in the region without a primary care practitioner. The project will leverage consortium expertise of the Reach Alliance in research for home health care service transformation in rural communities, and the community experience of health care providers in the Hastings region and the Hastings Prince Edward Ontario Health Team as a valued partner in the project’s design and implementation.
The resulting collaboration of this project will uniquely address the gap in rural healthcare service access by providing a level of efficiency and client personalization currently unmatched. By building a more efficient, supported system of connection and access to care, it will ultimately seek to help forge a path to more resilient rural healthcare systems across Canada.
