Today Status Solutions announced Garden Spot Village is implementing Status Solutions’ situational awareness and response management technology to enhance resident care and service delivery. Status Solutions Valued Business Partner Morefield Communications is providing solution design, implementation and local support. The CCRC, sitting on 104 acres in New Holland, Pennsylvania, provides independent living, personal care and skilled nursing for approximately 950 residents.
“Our purpose is to provide opportunities for our residents to live life to the fullest, wherever they happen to live on our campus,” says Steve Lindsey, CEO of Garden Spot Village. “That mission starts with a commitment to their safety and security but also extends to how they experience the community – from communication to services and amenities. We invest in doing what’s right for those who call Garden Spot Village home.”
The community will replace its current emergency call system with the Situational Awareness and Response Assistant (SARA), a universal alerting engine that integrates alarm and communication systems to deliver real-time, detailed alerts to key individuals, select groups/response teams or entire populations via the designated end points. The solution and its modes and actions are customized according to an organization’s IT infrastructure, protocols and escalation paths to ensure that a triggering event – from a blown fuse to a life-and-death scenario – is addressed by the right people in the right way.
Garden Spot Village will use SARA to power mobile duress pendants given to each resident, in addition to pull cords in each bathroom throughout the community. If a resident calls for help, an alert automatically will go to caregivers and/or nurses, including the approximate location of the alarm source. SARA’s Positioning System with vector-mapping speeds emergency response by enabling caregivers to find the alarm source, and therefore help the person in need, more quickly. Nurses within skilled care also will replace their pagers with Apple iPhones that include specially programmed dashboards controlled by SARA. Seeing the status of open alerts, and having both voice and data with these mobile dashboards will improve workflow and collaborative care for faster, more efficient response.
“After evaluating a number of technologies and working with our communications partner [Morefield Communications], it was clear that SARA provides more advanced, reliable capabilities for life safety, with Status Solutions having proved its expertise over 15 years,” explains Andrew Dietzel, IT director for Garden Spot Village. “Being able to implement multiple applications within the same infrastructure also was key from an IT perspective.”
SARA also will be integrated with Garden Spot Village’s PointClickCare EHR system to track resident adds, moves and changes, improving workflow and staff efficiency by eliminating duplicate entry of resident information, according to Dietzel. Future SARA integrations for centralized monitoring, alerting and reporting will likely include fire panels and security cameras, as well as sensors to monitor water temperature within skilled nursing, now a manual process to meet regulatory requirements, as well as in refrigerators/freezers to protect food inventories, he adds.
Timely communication and service delivery also is important for the overall resident experience, so Garden Spot Village also is implementing Status Solutions’ digital signage and self-service solution for mass notification. Approximately 550 Garden Spot independent-living residents will receive various announcements – from schedule changes to inclement weather warnings – via their in-room, self-service kiosks. Other content and services, such as dining menus, activity schedules and work orders for housekeeping, maintenance and IT, will be automated and published via kiosk to improve both workflow and service delivery. Formerly known as CATIE, this situational awareness technology runs on an Apple iPad to serve as an always-on message center, electronic bulletin board/digital signage and concierge. “We appreciate that this solution is ‘locked-down’ so we can broadcast important information to our residents. It also lays the groundwork for us to add staff and resident directories, video and other capabilities to keep our residents digitally connected.”
