This article is sponsored by Brightree. In this Voices interview, HME Business speaks with Addison Perrymond, Head of Product, Brightree, discussing new ways that home-based care providers are using technology in 2025, the connection between speed of technology development and employee retention, and how providers might react to reimbursement pressure in the year ahead.
HME BUSINESS: What life and career experiences drove you to senior care, and then to Brightree?
ADDISON PERRYMOND: My late grandmother had to move into long-term care from being in home care and faced some challenges. She didn’t have the care she needed, and we saw a lot of opportunity to improve upon that. I took a mental note. Being in health care for over 25 years, I said to myself, there has to be a better way to solve for this.
And then professionally, with my deep entrenched digital health background, I thought there was a way to combine those two experiences once I came to Brightree. That alignment both professionally and personally allows me to leverage the best of both and will ultimately help me move Brightree toward the next phase of developing innovative solutions to solve for those challenges.
What were the new ways that home-based care providers used technology tools in 2024 to address staffing challenges and turnover, and what are you anticipating seeing in 2025?
Staffing turnover is a big challenge and there are two parts to that: retaining existing staff members who are doing great work and recruiting the folks with the right skillset who need to join the organization. What we saw in 2024 is that remote patient monitoring became more and more widespread, enabling caregivers to oversee patients without having to physically be in the same space.
That allowed for better staff optimization. And using analytics brought two other benefits: we could better forecast patient needs, and we could best determine how to use staffing resources to serve those needs.
So, when we take a step back and look out to 2025, I really believe that with the deeper integration around AI and automation, we’ll start to continue to hear more and more companies placing an emphasis there, with suppliers and providers looking to bring in those technology solutions to help reduce some of that burden on the staff, including staff burnout. Those challenges will continue to be a friction point if we don’t use technology to do that.
I would also imagine wearable devices being adopted more, and AI voice-enabled technologies will help enhance patient engagement, using real-time data to further advance the delivery of care.
How has the speed of technology development impacted employee retention?
The speed of technology development has been interesting to observe across the health care sector, because it does a couple of things with how fast we’re moving. Health care generally moves slower than other adjacent industries, but as we’re now starting to get that infusion of the need to have advanced technology, I’m seeing two different things that are happening that seem to be opposing each other.
On the one hand, modern tools help eliminate some of those administrative burdens we spoke about earlier and start to reduce burnout. But then on the other hand, it creates this technical challenge: does your staff have the appropriate training and the implementation handoff that allows them to adapt to that new technology? We’ve seen where the introduction of new technology can also feel more burdensome for staff members who haven’t adopted new technology before. So how you bring in that new technology is really important.
I think success comes from aligning technology implementation with clear staff and patient value proposition. What that would do for providers is create cross horizontal alignment and ultimately reduce those friction points.
I see that helping in three different areas. First, staff frustration, as we mentioned before. Second, reducing or even eliminating redundant tasks, particularly on the administrative side. And third, providing better tools for patient care and reducing and suppressing the adoption of technology that can feel overwhelming.
I think that leads us to some of the things we’re doing here at Brightree around strategic transformation. We really are looking to make sure that there is a value associated that will ultimately lead to a positive outcome for all stakeholders involved.
What do you expect home-based care providers to do in their reaction to reimbursement pressure this year?
This is another pain point that we’ve seen. I anticipate home-based care providers will adopt several strategic approaches, but two come to mind. They will invest in technologies that enhance operational efficiency, thereby ensuring accurate and timely reimbursement. And second, they will not simply use technology but they will use it to reimagine their care delivery models. I think both of those investments will really start to allow providers to separate themselves from their competitors.
In the first strategic initiative, we really think about AI and automation assisting, because that would help eliminate the staffing burden. You can start to advance on the intake and documentation side and change the workflow there. That ties into the second one, which is, how do we reimagine the workflow in care delivery?
Technology should empower that, and we believe we’re going to see more of those two pillars as we look into 2025 and further. Some of the things that we’re doing to support this is we’re creating intelligent document automation and other machine learning and AI products like attrition predictors and attrition indicators to really help mitigate some of those pressures on the reimbursement side.
In 2025, do you feel like operators fully understand the importance of connected systems that allow for interoperability?
When I reflect back over my career, I remember “interoperability” became a buzzword around 2012. There’s an obvious awareness of the need for interoperability, and I don’t think a lot of providers have yet made it a strategic imperative. They’ll say, “Yes, we need to do it,” but making it a strategic imperative has been lost. It’s not just about the ability to connect those systems — it’s about using the data we have through interoperability for that next generation of care delivery.
We need to help organizations prioritize interoperability as a strategic imperative rather than just thinking about it as a technical requirement. Being able to do that means transitioning from viewing interoperability as something that is merely technically required instead of viewing it as a value enabler. The challenges we see and will continue to see is that a lot of the health systems you need to integrate with are older. So where do we sit in that intersection to reduce the frustration, reduce the burden and the technical complexity by integrating with those legacy systems.
You may develop a new model around AI but if it can never get to the data. You will always have that gap. Moving it to a strategic imperative allows for providers to put the requisite funding, personnel and support behind moving the needle forward to create a more connected ecosystem. That will only lead to better care in the end for the patient.
What are the top tier of manual tasks that drive errors?
There are so many manual tasks in our industry. On the data entry side, faxes come in and there’s someone trying to manually enter that data in the analog. The validation piece, scheduling, transitions of care — they are often manual. And then there’s billing and other communication workflows. There are other areas that help drive errors or create a high propensity for errors because there are humans involved, and they’re swiveling between two monitors to enter data. Those inaccuracies then lead to delays in patient care, and maybe disruption in the care continuum, thereby reducing reimbursements, with providers probably having to submit claims multiple times.
What we’re looking to do is to remove a lot of that burden.
Finish this sentence: “2025 in home-based care technology will be the year of…?”
AI-driven personalization, which will lead to tailored care plans using predictive analytics to transfer patient outcomes or transform patient outcomes to improve operational efficiency.
Editor’s note: This article has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].