As we’re seeing in health care and so many other industries, the field of human services is beginning to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for a variety of purposes. This is true at Dungarvin, where AI technology is being carefully used to enhance its care and support of people in need of services.
Dungarvin’s Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) use Therap, a secure, web-based electronic medical record, to document and track information for the thousands of individuals they serve in 17 states.
Every day, staff members write notes in Therap to keep track of individuals’ progress, medications and other important data associated with their well-being and individual support. It is an enormous and constantly growing database.
Soon, Dungarvin will begin using Therap’s new, AI-powered QA Assistant to “read” through huge amounts of this data to help staff and supervisors quickly assess how a program/site is operating and what might be needed to enhance care and provide better support for individuals served, as well as staff, said Josh Dezurik, Dungarvin’s Director of Quality Assurance.
“QA Assistant reviews these narrative notes that our staff write, which are called T-logs, and if it thinks a note indicates the need for an incident report, it will ping the staff member within the app and ask them to consider it,” Josh said. “And it can understand the context, or kind of the vibe of what is actually occurring. This is really exciting because it unlocks data that otherwise could only be found through deep dive reviews, like reading every single note, one by one.”
Alongside QA Assistant, Dungarvin plans to implement another Therap tool called AI Summarization. It allows supervisors to generate summaries of T-log notes, overviews of programs/sites, over periods of up to six months, which is extremely beneficial for Quality Assurance, Josh said.
“We often fail to realize that there are flaws in our memories that can play out — we tend to remember things that happened more recently as more important, just because we can recall
more detail, he said. “Whereas AI balances the whole time period equally. It allows you to fast-track a summary, review or investigation that would take an incredibly long time to do.”
Josh was careful to emphasize that with any AI tool, there’s always the need for human oversight and validation of what it produces. AI tools are getting better all the time, but they do make mistakes. “For example, let’s say AI assesses a person’s medications and says they should discontinue taking a certain drug — now, nobody’s going to do that without first asking a doctor. But AI can be helpful in prompting that question,” Josh said.
Using the information the new AI tools rapidly generate, supervisors and managers will be able to take action faster to help both individuals served and the staff supporting them.
“And that’s where we want to go with it — how can we use these AI tools to identify issues or research items quickly so we can improve the quality of supports?” Josh said.
Josh and a Therap representative will present “AI in Human Hands: Tools for More Impactful Services,” during the ANCOR Connect ’26 conference, April 21-23 in Boston.
If you or someone you know is interested in learning how you can receive support from Dungarvin, please visit us at www.dungarvin.com to learn more.