Innovative Resident Call and Staff Communication Solution Helps Run Operations More Efficiently

Situation
Stuart Co. manages 35 housing sites that encompass senior living options as well as multi-family options. Stuart Co. also owns their own homecare agency to serve its assisted living and memory care residents. The Alton Memory Care, located in St. Paul, Minnesota, provides a person-centered, homelike living environment for the specialized needs and services for over 40 residents with memory loss. A core goal during the design of this new community was creating an environment where care giving staff could understand and recognize the needs of the residents immediately, and therefore allow The Alton staff to deliver a more personalized and superior level of care. “We knew that technology would play a major role in embracing our holistic approach to resident care. This includes excellent healthcare services, increased resident independence, more staff-resident interaction, and close involvement with the family,” explains Kim Webster, Director of Senior Care for The Alton Memory Care. “That is why we were looking for an innovative system that would provide noninvasive resident call and communication capabilities and allow us to automatically monitor and report on day-to-day residents’ and staff activities,” Webster adds. It was also important that the solution would tie together existing systems already in place at The Alton.

Solution
The choice of the Intelligent InSites Visibility Platform™ solution quickly became clear. “It is truly an ‘all-inclusive’ solution. Plus, its flexibility allows ease in changing processes or systems as needed,” explains Webster. The solution combines leading locationsensing devices and web-based software which provide significant improvements in resident care and staff effectiveness. The real-time locating and communication system uses small pendants to monitor the presence of residents and staff members within the community. Each pendant includes a button the residents or staff press when they need assistance. The system also includes configurable rules that enable alerts to be routed and, if necessary, automatically escalated to notify the appropriate staff member via their mobile PDA. This feature is utilized, for example, to protect residents with Alzheimer’s from wandering from the community, promoting the independence of the residents while ensuring their safety. Additionally, staff are now able to access their existing clinical and billing software, Residex, through the InSites mobile PDA. This means that personnel is able to access resident healthcare information from anywhere in the community with just a few taps on their PDA. According to Webster, with appropriate training the staff quickly feels comfortable with the solution and daily use of the solution does not require involving the IT support.

Benefits
“We love how integrated and expandable the InSites solution is. Our staff can instantly receive resident calls, look up a resident’s allergies, or request help from another staff member via their PDA,” explains Webster. Another benefit of the Intelligent InSites system is its ability to track and report on response times to resident calls, activities attended, staff-resident contact time, and the residents’ general mobility. The information is then utilized to ensure proper billing for services and to create more effective staff schedules and tasks assignments. Additionally, having instant access to information allows The Alton to provide a comprehensive overview of residents’ activities to their families. “When the family members want to see the types of activities and level of attention their loved one is receiving, we can simply retrieve this information from the InSites solution, instead of scrambling to find it in the pile of hand-written reports,” points out Webster. Thanks to this advanced system, accurate and timely information can be provided with no added effort, allowing families to stay up-to-date and be a part of the care team, and at the same time not taking away from the time staff spend with residents. “The InSites solution helps us to run operations more efficiently and ensure the high quality standards of our community. Most importantly, it improves the quality of life and safety for our resident. I most definitely recommend it to other memory carecenters and assisted living facilities,” Webster concluded.