The company works with the likes of BrightStar Care, Home Instead, Visiting Angels, Griswold and Always Best Care, according to its website. It leverages audio technology to detect abnormal events in a senior’s home.

In 2022, the company raised $14 million in Series A funding. The most recent funding round was led by Zeev Ventures and Insight Partners. Existing investors Entrée Capital, Flint Capital, Jibe Ventures and Secret Chord Ventures also participated in the round.

“When our customers say that Sensi is more than just technology, that there is a heart behind it, we know we are on the right path,” Sensi.AI Co-Founder and CEO Romi Gubes said in a statement. “We are dedicated to ensuring every senior can age with dignity in the comfort of their own home, the place they love most. This funding from renowned investors will help us continue to innovate our product and scale our go-to-market strategy, bringing our vision to life.”

The dementia care expert Teepa Snow is an advisory board member at Sensi.AI. Her Positive Approach to Care program previously partnered with the company.

“We’re very excited because Sensi is this sort of audio awareness system. It has that level of awareness — what’s happening in that environment 24/7. It’s not really recording every second, it’s just noticing things,” Snow previously told Home Health Care News. “When it picks up on something that’s care related, or distress related or good care related, or an anomaly, then it records about 10 seconds of an interaction right around that. Then it creates a signal to the dashboard that says this has happened, and it could be an indication that something good or not good is going on.”

Sensi.AI is based in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, and also has offices in the United States. In addition to the aforementioned providers, it supports “over 80% of the largest home care providers in the U.S.,” according to the company.

Its technology extracts hundreds of insights on a senior’s well being, and that information is sent back to a clinical care team that includes social workers, occupational therapists, geriatric clinicians and nurses.

With staffing shortages persisting in home care, providers have recognized emerging technologies as one way to augment care staff in the home.

“When I came across Sensi, I immediately recognized the magnitude of the problem they were solving. It requires more than simply applying AI technology,” Oren Zeev, founding partner at Zeev Ventures, said in a statement. “I am confident that Sensi’s advanced audio AI technology along with their talented team will spearhead a transformation in the care ecosystem unlike anything seen before.”

Home-based care providers and AI

For years, home-based care provider leaders expressed their belief that AI solutions could ease pain points in the space.

Both home health and home care providers saw the opportunities to supplement staffing, or even to recruit or retain better. Home health providers also saw the opportunity to ease the documentation burden on clinicians, increasing efficiency, operations and retention rates.

Now, those solutions are actually beginning to be realized. Home care providers are partnering with platforms like Sensi.AI, and they’re also developing their own AI solutions.

Take the Phoenix-based Devoted Guardians as an example. It has completely transformed its recruiting process through AI, ensuring applicants are always receiving timely responses from the company.

“The minute someone is engaging us on any of these platforms, we have an AI system that’s going to engage back — answer any question that they might have and really drive them to scheduling interviews — to really cut down on those ghosting problems that we’ve been all seeing over the last couple of years,” Devoted Guardians CEO Aaron Sinykin told HHCN earlier this year.

Home health providers have also come up with AI documentation tools like Apricot, which was launched by the home health CEO Trent Smith. Apricot can reduce documentation time for home health nurses by “up to 85%,” according to Smith.

“I just saw a solution to some problems that we had,” Smith said. “And I was fortunate to know people that could help me build it. We found a nail and then went and built a hammer for it, as opposed to building a hammer and looking for a nail.”

While many providers are now applying AI, they’re using it in a variety of ways. The support for Sensi.AI is just another example of the possibilities for the emerging technologies in both home care and home health care.

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Trent Smith, the CEO of the Oklahoma City-based Accentra Home Health and Hospice, is behind the new startup, Apricot, which leverages generative AI specifically. Accentra has been using Apricot for months, but now Smith has other providers signing up for it, namely Elara Caring and Choice Health at Home.

The ethos behind Apricot is around giving time back to home health nurses. The generative AI can help cut documentation time by “over 85%,” according to the company.

Beyond those time-saving qualities, there is massive potential upside elsewhere. For instance, reduced turnover costs, more clinical capacity, greater value-based care capabilities and Medicare Advantage (MA) opportunities.

“When I discovered generative AI and started messing around with it, it occurred to me that this technology could be used to help our industry in a number of different ways,” Smith told Home Health Care News. “I thought I could build a tool and use it for my own agency, so we built one to help nurses complete their startup care documentation accurately and quickly.”

On Accentra’s end, it delivers home health and hospice to over 500 patients across the state of Oklahoma.

Apricot, on the other hand, officially announced its launch last week. It is backed by the venture capital firm Cortado Ventures, which is also based in Oklahoma City.

While the AI tool was initially created for internal use only, Smith realized its enterprise value after an emotional conversation with a nurse who said the reduced documentation time gave her the opportunity to watch a movie and cuddle with her daughter after work.

“That is when I realized that this was something that I could give to the entire industry,” Smith said. “We pivoted from it being an internal tool for my agency to turning it into a business that we were going to give to all agencies.”

After that, Choice Health at Home CEO David Jackson was one of the first to get a glimpse at what would become Apricot. Jackson later mentioned the tool in a HHCN story, which then caught the eye of Elara Caring CEO Scott Powers.

Smith, Jackson and Powers all believe the tool will make the role of a home health nurse far more desirable, a prominent goal for an industry dealing with staffing shortages and burnout. Smith said Apricot is on track to serve more than 800 nurses and 20,000 patients monthly.

Both Choice Health at Home and Elara Caring are currently in the pilot stage of embedding the tool into their operations.

“I just saw a solution to some problems that we had,” Smith said. “And I was fortunate to know people that could help me build it. We found a nail and then went and built a hammer for it, as opposed to building a hammer and looking for a nail.”

Apricot’s application

Smith described Apricot as the “scribe in the scrubs” of nurses. Jackson described it as a tool that “pulls sources of truth from all over.”

“The Oasis specifically is a big, intimidating document,” Jackson told HHCN. “And very small sections of it are patient facing. We have documentation softwares, we have scrubbers, we have all this different stuff. It’s very hard to get everything to do one thing. But what I love about this is it’s pulling sources of truth from all these different places.”

Part of what Jackson is excited about is how the platform can augment work in home health care, in general. He believes it’s the best industry to be in, given the flexibility.

If Apricot can improve workflow and reduce burnout, it could be a mitigator to staffing shortages in the industry.

“We have the best gig,” Jackson said. “You go to the hospital floor, you can’t leave in the middle of the day to go to a doctor’s appointment, to pick up a kid from school. In home health, you can do that. But with that autonomy, it creates some difficulties for nurses. When you have a lot of autonomy as an employee, the documentation can crush someone. It’s very overwhelming. So, this doesn’t create the documentation for them. It doesn’t come up with the documentation for them. It just helps them get it into your system. And it helps them do it largely at the bedside.”

Powers called out the discrepancy between net promoter scores among home health patients and home health workers. With more time spent documenting than actually delivering care, home health clinicians only have an NPS of 29, Powers said. Patients, on the other hand, have an NPS of 94.

That’s why Powers had been searching for ways to “bring joy back to the job.” It’s been one of Elara Caring’s main focuses of late, which is why when he saw Jackson mention Apricot, he inquired further.

“If we can bring the joy back to the job, we can give more flexibility and we can actually provide people more care,” Powers told HHCN. “And, it’ll actually probably lower the costs for all of us, which also allows us to provide more care to people, and provide more benefits and all the kinds of things we all want to do. When we saw the article, I looked at my team and said, ‘Why the heck aren’t we doing this?’”

After staff satisfaction, there are a host of other areas where Smith, Jackson and Powers see Apricot helping.

One that Smith pointed out specifically is the ability to take on more MA patients.

“If you can increase the amount of patients a nurse can see in a standard eight-hour day, your incremental costs to adding more patients to your roster is minimal, and almost zero cost in a lot of cases,” he said. “Even if 100% of your additional patients are MA patients, those turn into great gross margin patients. And those are the exact same patients that we’re all struggling to accept. A lot of agencies just simply can’t afford to take the 40% pay cut on revenue when taking in these patients. But by decreasing this documentation time and allowing nurses to see more of them, we’re all able to say yes a lot more.”

Elara Caring and Choice Health at Home have pilots underway, with a strategy to expand utilization across their organizations in the near-term future. Specifically, Powers said that Elara Caring is handing the tool to clinicians that will likely be willing early adopters of a new technology.

As for Smith, he’s hopeful that Apricot will eventually spread across the home health industry.

“We’ve just been super lucky,” Smith said. “And we’re looking forward to onboarding more customers in the future.”

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