Many senior living communities find that organizational growth is both a reward and a challenge. While your hard work has enabled you to expand your services and improve your market share, you may find that keeping up with quality measures becomes more difficult. Advantage Living Centers (ALC), a 12-community organization based in Michigan, became fully aware of these challenges during a period of growth. ALC wanted to find a way to reduce incidents, improve care, and implement a consistent tracking system without losing momentum across their organization.
Incident Reporting That Works for All Your Communities
A streamlined, organized process becomes more crucial than ever when you’re in growth mode. Individual, home-grown spreadsheets that vary by community or are only accessible to certain staff members simply won’t cut it. With these methods, there’s no easy way to see how each community is performing, and where you need to focus and improve.
In ALC’s case, it quickly became apparent that they needed an easy-to-use, universal incident reporting system that could display and analyze data across all their communities. It wasn't just advantageous, it was essential.
Less Typing, More Interacting
But even the best universal system won’t help your organization, if staff aren't willing or able to complete the necessary steps to record your incident data. That’s why user-friendliness and efficiency were primary goals for ALC when they decided to implement their senior living software. When you’re already growing and finding your new normal on a larger scale, it’s important to provide staff with a way to get their job done with minimal hassle and frustration.
ALC needed a system that enabled their staff to quickly and accurately record the pertinent information at the time of an incident. They also needed it to be intuitive and designed for their unique needs. Making it easy for staff to input the proper information meant minimizing stress levels at the time of the event, improving accuracy of reporting, and saving time.
Focus on Adverse Events, Prevent Future Ones
Collecting your incident data in one clean, accessible system offers another advantage: the ability to view trends and reveal potential blind spots and areas of improvement. If your data is compiled into a dashboard that’s designed specifically for LTCs, you’ll have the edge you need to truly focus on providing exceptional care without digging through spreadsheets or trying to guess how you can improve based on piecemeal information.
ALC needed a system that could:
- Display incidents across the organization
- Enable them to focus on high-priority areas
- Identify incident root causes that would otherwise be impossible to pinpoint
The results were fast and astounding: ALC saw an 82% reduction in incidents within the first six months of their new system’s implementation.
Integrating Shouldn’t Be Difficult
An obvious concern for ALC, especially during its period of growth, was the ease of integrating it into their existing medical record system. They were looking for a risk management solution that would work seamlessly with what they were already doing so it could enhance their success, not stifle it. Their integration took only a few weeks, and, most importantly, allowed them to hit the ground running and avoid disruption to their quality of care.
Find out how ALC slashed their rate of adverse events, improved ROI, and got staff on board with a better incident reporting system — all during a time of growth. Download the ALC case study to get the details on their amazing results.
