NSF Award
2128739
This planning grant will develop a specific research agenda focused on how Future Work, Future Workers, and Future Technology are expected to change and impact workers in home care settings. These workers - home care aides – are at the front line of providing care to vulnerable individuals in their homes yet rarely receive standardized training. Furthermore, home care aides have historically worked in isolation with little interaction with other home care or healthcare workers, which is in contrast to caregivers who work in institutional settings. The isolated nature of home care aides appears to be changing, however, given an increasing focus on serving as boundary spanners, which refers to home care aides who coordinate a client’s care between a health care system and a community-based setting, such as a client’s home. Boundary spanners in home care settings can be responsible for attending physician visits with the client, sharing information about the client’s needs with the client’s healthcare team, and ensuring that the client adheres to needed health protocols and discharge instructions once the client has returned home from a visit or stay in a healthcare system. Additional challenges for home care aides include working in environments designed for clients to live and not for home care aides to provide services as well as working with technologies that purportedly facilitate better patient care yet were designed exclusively for other settings – hospitals and nursing homes in particular. Further, as Future Technology is developed and implemented, Future Work and skills of Future Workers will need to evolve from the current state to adequately and equitably leverage these technological solutions to provide care to clients in home settings. <br/><br/>This project brings together several disciplines, including several stakeholders - ranging from home care aides to leaders in the home care field to technology experts who create innovations for home care settings – to develop a future research agenda that reflects the intersection of home care and technology by considering Future Workers, Future Work, and Future Technology. We are supplementing external stakeholder expertise with our project team expertise, which includes experts knowledgeable about home health care, industrial/organizational psychology, medicine, sociology, demographers, public health, and evaluation. The investigator team is structured to achieve multiple convergent goals to develop a research agenda that identifies immediate, short-term, and long-term research needs to 1) study the way that Future Workers provide services to clients in their homes and 2) enhance the ability of Future Workers to function as boundary spanners between a client and the client’s physician and/or healthcare team. Our project team will use multiple data collection approaches, including an environmental scan, subject matter expert interviews, and monthly meetings with our stakeholder partners to develop an impactful and substantive research agenda. This project has been funded by the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier cross-directorate program to promote deeper basic understanding of the interdependent human-technology partnership in work contexts by advancing design of intelligent work technologies that operate in harmony with human workers.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
