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www.theactiveage.com Kansas’ Largest Newspaper ‘There were just too many obstacles’ Vol 44 No. 9
August 2023
How one small-town nursing home lost battle to stay open
By Joe Stumpe MOUNT HOPE — As the coronavirus pandemic decimated many nursing homes in 2020, Mary Schmidt felt pretty good about the situation at the Mount Hope Nursing Center. “We didn’t get COVID until November (of that year),” Schmidt,
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Volunteers have mowed the Mount Hope Nursing Center property since it closed.
chair of the nonprofit community group that owns the center, remembered last month. “Staff and everybody did a really good job of keeping residents and employees safe.” The nursing center saw residents die from COVID after that point, although Schmidt said deaths from all causes averaged about the same number as before the pandemic. But the pandemic was taking a toll on the facility in another way. Because of the federal government’s decision to lock down nursing homes, families were reluctant to place their loved ones in the facilities. “Not many people will say, ‘Let’s go take our loved one to a nursing center where we can’t see them,” Schmidt said. “When we lost people, we weren’t able to fill our beds. That’s our source of income.” The Mount Hope home closed in December 2022, one of 24 nursing
The image above doesn’t depict a real person. It was generated by asking an artificial intelligence tool called Adobe Firefly to produce an image of a “senior citizen using artificial intelligence.”
Artificial intelligence tools See Mount Hope, page 7 helpful, fun, but not perfect
Senior psych, health care expands here
By Joe Stumpe In her job running the Catholic Care Center, Cindy LaFleur knows it hasn’t always been possible to get immediate psychiatric care for residents needing it. Wichita’s only geriatric psychiatric unit, located in Ascension Via Christi St. Joseph on Harry Street, sometimes has a waiting list, which means an elderly person might be admitted to the emergency room instead. “They could spend days in ER,” LaFleur said. See Care, page 20
By David Kamerer You may not know it, but you’ve probably benefited from some recent advances in artificial intelligence, or AI. AI powers your Siri and Alexa, those cheerful personal assistants that answer your questions about the weather or who won the big game last night. AI controls self-driving cars and the maps we use to navigate when we take a trip. When you call customer service for your bank or credit card, you may initially speak with an AI model of a human, trained to answer basic questions. And it’s AI that recommends the Netflix movies you’ll want to watch. AI has been hiding in plain sight, helping make all kinds of technology smarter. But now AI is taking the spotlight, with a wave of new
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technologies, called generative AI, that generate content based upon your instructions. Let’s see what these new tools can do. The Chatbots: Chat GPT and Google Bard Chatbots have been built into other applications, like online customer service, for some time. But Chat GPT (CHAT Generative PreTrained Transformer) was the first multipurpose commercial chatbot that end users could control. It made waves when it was introduced by Open AI in late 2022 as a free tool. It quickly garnered more than 100 million signups. Chatbots mimic conversation through a text window: you ask a See AI, page 6
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