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South Australian home care and retirement living provider ECH – Enabling Confidence at Home – has partnered with Indigenous-led technology company Gadali to ease scheduling complexities through AI-enabled platform Schedtris.
The portmanteau derives from the words schedule and Tetris, in recognition of the difficulties providers have trying to make last minute changes to rosters and care schedules that fit the care needs of clients.
Since Schedtris went live at ECH in March, morning rescheduling time has fallen by 50 per cent.
The provider has also recovered approximately 15 hours of scheduling capacity each week from time previously spent managing last-minute changes.
The rollout has entered phase two, which focuses on building functionality and introducing additional features. These include linking it to the human resources system and automatically ringing people whose schedules have been changed to address the unplanned leave of colleagues.
The two companies found each other through their respective partnerships at Microsoft, with Schedtris being an AI‑powered M365 Copilot agent.
Schedtris looks similar to the ChatGPT interface but is connected to ECH’s schedule so that when someone takes unplanned leave it will make their sfift vacant. Schedtris then looks at who is available and searches for a replacement.
Compliance requirements are built into the program to ensure people screened as available have the right skills to be providing the service.
Once the tool completes a list of potential replacements, it grades their suitability for the vacant jobs and generates a percentage-based score.
It will also look at whether the available person has interacted with the client before, so that strangers are not being sent to provide personal care. It will also look at where their existing schedule is taking them to avoid sending workers an hour away just to drive back for their next visit.
Supporting the workforce, not replacing
ECH head of digital workplace services Sharon Paulson told Australian Ageing Agenda the ECH team has embraced Schedtris, which she partly attributes to involving the schedulers from the beginning.
The Gadali team showed ECH schedulers the new developments of Schedtris every week, so the tool was not some “mythical thing,” but instead something they had input into building, she said.
“From a change management point of view, it was fantastic,” Ms Paulson said.
There can be a lot of fear about the introduction of AI, particularly around job replacement but for Ms Paulson, it’s about thinking of AI as “an augmentation to your staff.”
“It’s not to replace staff – and we’ve got strict guardrails on humans in the loop,” she told AAA.
“This is about helping people with admin heavy tasks so that they’re freed up to be providing the care that they were hired to do.
“That’s how we’re talking about it with all our staff. We don’t want AI to take people’s jobs, we want to help take away those tasks that are killing them.”
It’s also important to start small and choose part of a process that AI can help with. Don’t jump straight into an end-to-end process, Ms Paulson told AAA.
Gadali founder and proud Ngunnawal man Dustin McClung told AAA that AI is a “phenomenal tool that can help you do your job but it’s not a replacement.”
“I often hear people say ‘oh, it’s amazing, it tells me all these things and it’s so right, or it’s so wrong – this, that, or the other thing’ – there’s no right or wrong in AI. It is only based around probability, and that probability is based on a whole bunch of information that’s been fed through it from previous human existence and stuff that’s on the web,” he said.
“There’s bias to it, but that’s because the bias exists. You need to utilise it for what it’s good at.
“I often say it’s like getting an intern in, the intern is immensely intelligent on a bit of everything… but [they] still need you to guide them, they still need you to tell them what you need.”
Mr McClung emphasised that AI will never be used for a final solution, but as a tool to help look at what other pathways and options exist for specific challenges.
Home-grown tech
Ms Paulson told AAA that key to their decision to partner with Gadali was how well the technology company “understood ECH’s mission” of wanting to help people in the community.
It is important to ECH to partner with Indigenous-led tech companies, which also forms part of the provider’s diversity strategy, she said.
Ms Paulson said she also finds Gadali’s mission of trying to get more First Nations people into the tech industry important.
Mr McClung shared a similar sentiment about ECH, telling AAA that the provider “aligns really well with the ethos we have.”
“They’re a very community-based organisation, they’re very focused on the client care,” he said.
“The financial is always a big impact on everyone, but it’s not their number one” priority, Mr MClung said. “They’re fastidious about giving their clients the best possible service. So that aligns with what we want to do as well.”
Building Australia’s tech capacity
Ms Paulson told AAA that she believes AI is going to be “an absolute game changer” for the aged care sector, and will help improve the quality of care because staff won’t be burdened by admin.
But Australia’s tech sector needs more workers. With around 949,000 workers today, the Technology Council of Australia says the sector is 79 per cent of the way to reaching the target of 1.2 million tech-related jobs by 2030.
Barriers to encouraging more people to join the tech sector come largely from access to reliable internet and power, but Mr McClung said he thinks the barriers are reducing as time goes on.
If secure internet access is established, there is “absolutely no reason why we can’t have centres of excellence sitting out in these rural and remote areas rather than having it overseas,” he said.
First Nations people are particularly underrepresented in the sector, Mr McClung said, and central to Gadali’s mission is to build and forge pathways for First Nations people into the tech industry.
You can only be what you can see, Mr McClung said.
“I’m not trying to do this and create these pathways and force people into it, we’re trying to create the opportunities, make them available. I want people to choose this, but I want to make it look really, really sweet,” he said.
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