BaptistCare teams pitch AI innovations to tackle real world challenges

BaptistCare recently held a Hackathon, affectionately called the Taco-thon, to explore how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and our team’s unique knowledge of the aged care sector can solve real-world challenges. 

Teams were formed from within the BaptistCare IT departments and together, they went about finding a solution to their challenge and pitching it to a panel of judges. 

So, what were they working on? Well, that was, in part, decided by residents at BaptistCare aged care homes. 

"The aim of the Tacathon was to foster innovation and collaboration by encouraging teams to develop AI solutions that address real-world problems faced by BaptistCare. Each team was tasked with identifying specific challenges within the organisation and leveraging artificial intelligence to create practical and impactful solutions," said Petrina Greenwood, Head of IT Strategy and Innovation at BaptistCare. 

“ This initiative not only showcased the potential of AI in transforming our services but also highlighted the creativity and dedication of our teams in driving positive change."

Across the teams, the types of ideas pitched to the judges included: 

• A ChatBot that trouble-shoots IT issues 
• Building knowledge articles to drive ChatBot expansion 
• Automated candidate shortlisting for recruitment 
• Using AI to get insights and identify trends and prevention strategies for incident reporting  
• Capturing the amount of time spent on tasks using AI

The judges had the difficult task of selecting an overall winner, and in the end the winning was a little like online dating meets residential aged care. 

The winning team, Taco Transformers, pitched a tool that Lifestyle Coordinators can use to pair the interests, backgrounds, hobbies or talents of residents with each other, fostering meaningful engagements and facilitate that first step in social interaction. 

This tool would be integrated within systems already used at BaptistCare and could enourage one-on-one interactions between residents, to create mini social clubs or plan resident activities to match the interests of the residents in the home. 

The team said it’s a tool that will “empower Lifestyle Coordinators to easily determine which activities BaptistCare residents are interested in and then to set up meaningful activities to increase social engagement”. 

“The Taco-thon was a great way to engage our problem thinking with our innovative capabilities and used artificial intelligence to build solutions to these real-world problems,” said Petrina. 

“At BaptistCare, we pride ourselves on creating these types of activities that bring knowledge, intuition, cross-organisation connection and innovation together in a way that’s also a bit fun.”