If your senior living organization consists of multiple communities, you know it’s essential for each community to report its risk management data to the regional and corporate leadership. The incident data you receive are your “eyes and ears” when you can’t be at each community all the time.
But just having the data isn’t enough. To make the most of your QA reporting, you need a system that’s designed to collect the data from all your communities and present it in a way that’s conducive to addressing issues swiftly and thoroughly. Ideally, you need a quality assurance dashboard that can show you the information you need in a clear, intelligent manner that saves you time and effort.
Unfortunately, if your communities are using their own manual reporting system, it’s challenging—if not impossible—to accomplish this. Here’s why manual reporting systems fall short, and why you need to use specialized senior living software that’s designed to give you the valuable information you need in a streamlined, user-friendly format.
Using a Spreadsheet Is a Gamble
While you may have a few Excel-savvy team members who know how to maneuver the program with ease, others will likely be novice spreadsheet users at best. And you'll eventually run into issues with blank fields, inconsistent data formatting, and unusable information. The end result is a mixed bag of good and bad data that ultimately won’t help you get a clear picture of how all your communities are doing, both individually and as a whole.
Time is also an important factor. Your staff are busy taking care of residents, especially right after an incident has occurred. If their manual reporting system takes too much time or is too cumbersome to use, you’ll get the bare minimum of information, and you may end up with missing details that could have been used to help remedy the situation.
An EHR Isn’t Enough
Although an EHR tracks your resident information, it has no way to give you the higher level data required to produce comprehensive, streamlined reports about your communities. An EHR is simply not designed to help you address and prevent incidents. It’s your tool for information storage, not quality improvement.
Using a System Designed for QA Reports
Spreadsheets have their place, but senior living risk management isn’t it. Without a clear, comprehensive QA dashboard created from clean, consistent data across your organization, it’s easy to get an incomplete—or inaccurate—picture of how each of your communities is doing.
An incident at one community affects all your communities, and you need that crucial information in order to help correct the incident at hand and prevent further ones from occurring. In fact, the right system may be able to help you boost your resident outcomes, even if you have more than 60 communities to manage.
Implementing assisted living software that includes a QA dashboard will enable you to glean useful, clear action steps and plans from the information that you won’t ever get from multiple spreadsheets. And you’ll be giving your staff the ability to quickly and easily input the information so they can provide the details and get back to what matters most: caring for residents.
Experience incident reporting the way it should be for SNFs and ALFs. Request a free demo of QA Reader, the system that was specifically designed to improve quality assurance efforts for senior living communities.
Next Steps
- Learn more about improving your QA—subscribe to our blog
- See how QA Reader gets more out of your EHR system—download our info sheet
- Request a custom demo of QA Reader
