Do You Have a Program Designed to Reduce Fall Risk?

February 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Senior woman in wheelchair with caregiver

How do you use technology to mitigate resident fall-risk & maximize independence?

The risk is real
The awareness related to fall risks over the last few years is staggering. One in five hip fractures results in a death within a year of the incident. One in four seniors that fall and fracture a hip, who used to live independently, spend at least the next year in an assisted living or nursing home environment. It’s also a little concerning how little, as an industry, we’ve done to mitigate the risk. Fall detection is largely a waste, the damage is done, and unless the resident is unconscious automated fall detection devices do little more than let you know the horse is out of the barn.

What can you do?
Fall prevention programs need to be comprehensive and targeted. Do you evaluate the medications your residents are taking and develop specific and targeted prevention programs if their medication puts them at increased risk? If a resident has had a previous fall, do you know the likelihood of them falling again compared to those who have never had a fall? Are you putting technology and processes in place to create an environment which reduces a resident’s risk of a repeat incident? Knowing the precursors of a fall is a critical component to prevent it from happening.

For further reading on the risks related to falls and the possible outcomes, often life threatening, visit the CDC’s Website on Falls for Older Adults .

If you don’t currently employ technology to prevent a fall then contact your sales representative
(sales@tel-tron.com) to talk about what it takes to be successfully implement a fall prevention strategy.

To learn more about the benefits of Tel-Tron’s unique fall management technology, click here.

Filed under Staff Notification, Emergency Call - Life Safety, Resident Wellness, Customer Success and Support, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Maximize the Potential of Your Emergency Call System

January 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Are Senior Living Management Teams Out of Touch? The Senior Care Investor www.seniorcareinvestor.com thinks so. In a year where many strong companies in our market grew at an impressive clip, others faltered. During these periods of growth the challenges of bringing on new buildings in different states of disrepair, staff members from different performance cultures, and resident occupancy varying greatly by geographical market have restricted earning potential for even the industry leaders. To steal a quote from the SeniorCare Investor’s most recent publication, “When someone figures out how to profitably run a large chain but maintain a mom and pop feel, then that company will top the return lists every year.” Whether you are the mom and pop provider or you’re trying to create that feeling within your community, personal attention to detail and a level of concern for the quality of life and security of your residents is what creates the “I’m home” feeling.

Being there when a resident needs you, responding with the same passion you would to your own family, being able to know when you miss and make it right; these are just the first steps to creating the feeling of home. You’ve got dinner, the air conditioning, the community bus, and putting green to worry about. Let us tell you when to worry about a resident’s security and emergency health needs require your attention. Let us take care of the compliance to your internal policies.

There is amazing new and innovative technology being created every day by us and companies like ours that goes under-utilized. Many of you already own it and just aren’t taking advantage of what you’ve already bought. All you have to do is invest the time to better understand how knowing what you don’t know can change the lives of your residents.

Here’s a quick tip to ensure that your key team members are really in touch with what happens at the front lines of your communities. Follow the steps below to enable a notification sent directly to your cell phone every time a resident waits more than ten minutes for assistance. You may think your front line is staffed appropriately and responding with the same passion you would, but this will let you know for sure.

Log into your Auditrak reporting package at www.auditrak.com and select the My Auditrak tab.

Select the Contact Methods link on your My Auditrak page and ensure that your contact information is correct.

 Once your contact information is correct go back to your My Auditrak tab and select the link for Event Notification Setup.

If I were interested in Emergency Call events I would select that option from the list, it’s the last item listed in the above image, then select the option for Report after and change the value to 10 minutes.  If I select SMS as the notification option I will now receive a notification every time an Emergency Call at the selected community reaches 10 minutes without being responded to by the staff onsite.  This will give any executive a real time feel for what’s happening at the community level.  Allowing you to intervene and change the experience of your residents in nearly real time can make the difference between the feeling of home and the feeling that they are alone an uncared for.

If you’re interested in having a discussion or seeing a demonstration about how the systems you already own can allow your team to better focus their time on what matters most and ensure that leaders in your company know when things aren’t right on the front lines send me an email at mgraham@tel-tron.com or give me a call at 386-523-1078 so we can start the changes today.

Filed under Customer Success and Support, Emergency Call - Life Safety, In the Cloud, Staff Notification Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Throw out that PC based system and get in the CLOUD!

May 23, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Once upon a time, senior living communities paid someone to be at the front desk 24 hours a day.  They did this because the emergency call system consisted of a panel of lights and buzzers mounted on the wall.  If a resident needed help, a light would turn on and a buzzer would sound.  Someone had to be within earshot of this panel at all times, or calls for help would go unanswered.  Once they heard it, though, alerting the care givers that someone needed help was another inefficient and labor intensive task.

When Tel-Tron introduced pocket paging to the wireless emergency system call industry (100 years ago…) both problems were solved.  Care givers wore pagers and were alerted right away when a resident needed help.  This eliminated the need for panels of lights and buzzers, and the need to pay someone to watch them 24 hours a day.  This was a transformation of the way senior living providers operated their buildings and provided care to their residents.  Really, it would be hard to imagine not having pagers or some other mobile staff device today.

Portion of Auditrak Dashboard

What does this have to do with cloud computing?  Everything.  When Tel-Tron introduced Auditrak.com, another senior living transformation began.  With the release of the ethernet gateway for our CompanionOne product line, Tel-Tron’s nurse call system has completed it’s migration to the cloud.  What is the cloud and how does it help senior living, you ask?  Let me explain. (click here for the wikipedia definition)

In the pocket paging example above, people were slaves to the front desk, because that is where the alarm panel was located.  The “data” they needed to respond to resident emergencies was accessible from only one place – the front desk.  The same is true on PC based system today.

System programming information, resident usage metrics, audit trail reports, maintenance notifications, resident check-in data, even changing resident pendant codes is all located, stored and managed from the personal computer located on-site.  You have limited or no access to that data or functionality from outside the building.  You have limited or no way to keep all of that data backed up on a real time basis.  You have limited or no way to integrate that system with other systems located outside of the facility, such as your accounting, or resident management software.

Worst of all…..Once you buy a computer based system, you are saddled with never ending upgrades, maintenance contracts, having to replace the computer itself every couple years, your staff uses the computer to play games or surf the web (see previous blog about that particular nightmare), Microsoft changes operating systems routinely, loss of functionality during a power outage…  Really, the list of downside risks to a PC based system are endless.  What’s the answer?

Enter the cloud!  Instead of your entire emergency call system being controlled and run by a software program on a local PC, host all of that functionality in the cloud (on the internet).

Your on-site system includes all of the devices in the resident rooms, all of the mobile devices used by the staff, one or more alarm consoles, the wireless or hardwired monitoring infrastructure.  But the activity data, programming information, reporting software, charting and graphing software, trend analysis, and system monitoring is “hosted” offsite.  You access this site through an internet browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari.  Which means you do NOT buy a dedicated PC for the emergency call system.  You use any PC (or iphone, blackberry, ipad, etc) you want, from anywhere you want, whenever you want.

  • There is no software to upgrade on site, ever.  The hosted software is always current.
  • You don’t have to keep back-up disks, or tapes on site.  Your data is always on line and backed-up continuously.
  • You don’t have to worry about your staff breaking the computer, surfing the web, or otherwise messing up the PC.  Because THERE ISN”T ONE.  I know this is a mental leap.  But it is literally transformational to the industry.  Senior living CTO’s, IT managers, even maintenance people are loving the fact that their systems no longer are PC based or dependent.

Sample Report of All Alarms with a "Resident Wait Time" of more than 10 minutes

In addition, once your secure data is in the cloud, you don’t need to run reports any longer.  Establish operating parameters and reports will be automatically sent to you (or anyone else) whenever something occurs outside those parameters.  Two small examples:  Many Executive Directors get a report emailed to them every morning listing any emergency call where the resident’s wait time was longer than 10 minutes.  Regional Operations Directors have this same report sent to them monthly for all communities in their territory.  Regional Maintenance Directors get a weekly report automatically emailed to them of all system trouble items that have occurred, and not resolved in the appropriate time.  I know, that was three examples, but the possibilities are endless.

Last one..any notification can be sent via email, or text message.  Some Operations Vice Presidents want to know right away if there is an elopement activity such as a window alarm, or “screen removed” alarm in an memory impaired section.  Elopement is a big deal these days and an early heads-up is helpful.

I know this is a lot to take in and understand, but having your emergency call systems data hosted and managed in the internet cloud, means a whole lot less headache for on-site staff related to computers, and an almost limitless opportunity for growth and integration in the future.  Just as pagers changed the industry in the late 80s, cloud computing will change senior living over the next few years.  Just browse on over to Auditrak.com and you’ll see what I mean.

I didn’t talk specifically about this, but having a single hosted location for systems data and management is exponentially more valuable if a senior living operator has multiple sites.

One day we’ll look back and say…”Remember when we used to have a PC run our emergency call systems.  How did we ever survive?”

Filed under Emergency Call - Life Safety, In the Cloud, Integration Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Enough Already. The PC has to go!

May 16, 2010 by 1 Comment

Dig hole in sand....Insert head!

All you have to do is read words in this picture, which was taken by one of our salespeople when touring a community that just installed a new emergency call system from a competitor.  WOW!  I cannot believe that someone would actually write that memo – clearly aware of the implications of not obeying – and think that just writing a note makes everything OK.

IT’S NOT OK!   You are tasked with making sure that a resident’s call for help gets answered.  And for lots of reasons, including this one, a personal computer is a completely inappropriate engine for an nurse call system.  In case you can’t read the picture, here is what it says.

“Please do not use this computer to go onto the internet.  This computer runs our nurse call system and is vitally important.  Thanks, Jane.”

Jane – Rather than writing a memo, you should have thrown that system out and replaced it with one that is not computer based.  Can any of you think of a single system that is a life safety device that runs on a Windows computer?  Please leave a comment to this post if you can.

Defibrillators? No.  Airplane Avionics?  No.  Dialysis Equipment? No.  Automobile Electronics?  No.

When you hear about someone who is on “life support,” do you think it would be wise to have that equipment run by a Windows computer?  No way.  So why is it OK to put the lives of senior living residents in the temperamental control of a Windows personal computer?  Short answer….It isn’t!  They freeze up.  They need rebooting.  Software needs updating.  They aren’t battery backed up for longer than a few minutes.  Really the list is endless.

Staff can close the program.  Staff can turn them off (on purpose, or on accident).  And, as in the case captured in this picture, staff can browse the internet while calls for help go unanswered.  It simply isn’t necessary.

On an enterprise quality nurse call system, the main servers, switches, routers and gateways use embedded systems, industrial microcontrollers, sophisticated power supplies, elaborate supervision and battery back-up methodologies.  There are design tolerances measured in sub-1% range.  User GUIs are browser based and access data on the system, but do not control the system.  Visit Auditrak.com, for an example of a killer call system GUI that resides in the cloud.

As I looked at the picture in the beginning of this article, I was so frustrated at the lack of seriousness with which Jane took her role as caregiver.  In fairness, Jane probably did not select that system.  Someone at her corporate office, who doesn’t have to respond to an emergency call – ever – probably picked it as a result of their beauraucratic purchasing system.  Still…the kind of compromise and accommodation Jane is forced into is simply not necessary.  There are other options.

Filed under Before You Buy, Emergency Call - Life Safety, In the Cloud, Staff Notification Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Wireless Network….Heal Thy Self!

May 15, 2010 by 3 Comments

Every time I hear someone say “wireless emergency call systems are pretty much all the same” it makes my want to pull my hair out.  While it is true that many systems have a similar mission, there are very few similarities in how the mission gets

Click here for a tutorial

 accomplished.  Here is a HUGE, IMPORTANT, SIGNIFICANT, FUNDAMENTAL, MEANINGFUL  example.  Enough emphasis?

On most wireless networks used for emergency call systems, if one access point (transceiver) fails, YOU LOSE EVERY OTHER RECEIVER DOWN LINE.  That’s because signals “hop” from one transceiver to the next all the way back to the computer.  Any break in the chain and the call for help goes unanswered.  GOOD ENOUGH for email, surfing the web, etc.  BAD IDEA when the data being transmitted is a person’s call for help.

That is why Tel-Tron never designed an emergency call system using the point-to-point wireless networking scheme described above.  In 2008, we released our version of a wireless network using what is called a “Self Healing, Wireless Mesh Network.” Translation:  If any access point fails, the downline access points can automatically reroute.  The network self-heals.  And, since all Tel-Tron systems are fully supervised, the system will alarm and display which access point has failed.  As of this writing, no other company is offering this level of wireless network service.  (No other company designs and manufactures their own wireless products…..but that is a post for another time.)  For a neat flash based tutorial on this topic, please click here.

Even the chip manufacturer was impressed, and published a “Customer Success Story” on our implementation. Check it out.

I suppose a rough analogy is the difference between run-flat tires and standard tires.  With a standard tire, if you get a flat your trip is over until you change the tire.  With a run-flat tire, if you get a flat, you are notified, but your trip is uninterrupted.  That kind of safety and redundancy seems like a great idea if you were a woman driving alone at night through a sketchy part of town on your way home.  Or, if you were a senior living resident who was counting on your call for help getting answered.

There are hundreds of differences like this between wireless nurse call system providers.  So, no, emergency call systems are not all “pretty much the same.”

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Filed under Before You Buy, Emergency Call - Life Safety, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Never Miss a Staff Rounds Check Again!

May 14, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Many senior living operators have a problem.  There staff is supposed to be checking on certain residents on a regular basis, but there is no way to prove that it was actually done.   A quick software upgrade to your Tel-Tron emergency call system and you can guarantee that you will never miss a room check again.

Simply install a “staff check-in” device in each area where the staff is supposed to show up.  Tell the software how often a staff person is supposed to be in that area (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.).  If the staff check-in device is not used in the time window you set-up, an alert will be displayed on the system, alerting management and staff that a check-in has been missed.

For example….Let’s suppose that you are supposed to be doing 2 hour room checks in your dimentia units.  First, you install a “staff-check” button in each unit.  Then, you tell the system (through the software) that each unit should have a staff visit every two hours.  Now, let’s pretend that it has been two hours and no one has pressed the “staff-check” device in Mrs. Smith’s room.  You will get an alarm on your system – pagers, console, text message – whatever — that says “Two Hour Check Missed – Mrs. Smith, Room 1.”  The only way to clear that alert is to actually go to Room 1 and press the staff-check button.

No one likes to talk about it, but every manager knows that FORCED COMPLIANCE with policies and procedures is the best way to make sure the appropriate actions are taken.   With “Staff Check-In” activated in your community, you can be sure that all of your rounds are being completed.

(You can use this for building rounds at night, too.  Put a staff-check button in hallways, libraries, laundry rooms, or anywhere you want your staff to be on a regular basis.  Then tell the system how often they should be there and you can be SURE that your staff did what they were supposed to do).

Filed under Resident Wellness, Staff Notification Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

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