If your community is a three- or four-star facility, you may well have it in your DNA to make the leap to five-star status. And if you're a one or two star, maybe it was just bad luck that got you demoted—just a bad survey or an unfortunate resident fall. Hope is a great attribute, but it's not a strategy. As Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
So if you want to achieve a five-star rating, you do have an opportunity to do that! Everyone wants to be a five-star, and it should be a real goal. But how can you get there? The truth is that you and your team have to do a thousand things a day (seriously) really well. But the two most critical areas where you can drive results are staffing adequately for acuity and professionally managing adverse events.
Staffing for Acuity
Everyone in the long term care sector understands the difficulties of staffing, let alone staffing for acuity, so I won't dwell on staffing. Simply put, if you struggle with staffing or if you intentionally staff lean to save money, then you really don’t have a chance. You're set up to fail. End of story.
But there's still the difficult challenge of managing care and adapting to shifting resident acuity. It’s not like your residents stay the same over time. Your residents don't change at the same rate and residents in one community don't age exactly like your other communities. It can leave you pulling your hair out trying to stay on top of it all, and you probably feel like you don’t have a chance, sometimes.
Leveraging Data to Become a 5-Star Facility
So how do you get a chance at five-star status? Hopefully you already have a team in place, decent communication, and a culture of caring. To professionally manage adverse events, you need all these, plus data.
The good news is, you already have the data. You're investing hundreds of hours each year collecting the data. You probably look at the data occasionally and try to do something in response to it. Your staff completes incident reports and someone enters information into Excel spreadsheets. Your quality committees sometimes review the spreadsheets and once in a blue moon they contain actionable information that you can apply.
But your current activities don't actually contribute to professionally managing adverse events. It's a leaky process that doesn’t support quality care, and it's actually really expensive. But the good news is that you can support professional management, provide quality care, and save money doing it!
Successfully Managing Adverse Events
QA Reader is an adverse event management application that gets you out of inputting gobbledygook into Excel spreadsheets. QA Reader does it for you—and turns your incidents into real data that provides real insight that empowers you to take action where it's needed most.
With easy-to-use reports and visualizations, you can see how residents, floors, buildings, days of the week, and time of day are trending. You can save hundreds of hours a year just on data input and, even better, your quality committee can get ready faster and make better decisions with better data. Your survey prep can be drastically improved with a single, easy-to-run report. You can benchmark shifts, days of the week and buildings with each other or compare them to facilities across the country.
So give yourself a chance at achieving five-star status. See what QA Reader can do for you and request a demo today.
