Data is critical to healthcare organizations in improving key patient outcomes and containing costs, but many organizations are overwhelmed with the sheer amount of data they have. They may not have the necessary resources to manage the data and extract key information and analysis that can develop solutions to issues they are experiencing. When organizations offering care to vulnerable patients like the elderly can harvest the maximum value from their data, they can deliver higher quality and more accessible care through evidence-based decision-making.
The Challenge: Responding Quickly to Elderly Patients’ Care Needs
More than 1.1 million Americans live in nursing homes,1 and 800,000 Americans live in assisted living residencies.2 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nursing home workforce sector has lost nearly 229,000 caregivers since February 2020,3 a gap that will only grow with an aging population and a growing healthcare workforce shortage.
When workforce shortages are coupled with increased patient risk, the chance of adverse incidents—like falls, pressure ulcers, infections, medication errors, and others—rises. If healthcare organizations like nursing homes and assisted living facilities cannot respond to issues in real time, patients may suffer critical outcomes.
Our Approach:
We are healthcare authorities who are also experts in leveraging technology to harvest the maximum value from your data to allow you to deliver accessible, quality care through better, evidence-based decision-making.
To help address problems facing healthcare organizations serving the elderly population, our team partnered with a state’s elder affairs office to manage its service information management system. We built incident reporting systems for assisted living residences and Aging Service Access Points that now allow case managers to act on the incident within 24 hours, ensuring that the elders being served to get the care and support they need quickly.
Results:
Our team provided the elder affairs office with actionable intelligence that has enabled them to accelerate decision-making and response to issues from 4.3 days to 1.8 days and reduce labor costs by 30%. We managed data feeds from their case management system and partners, integrating cross-agency health services data, and providing clean, easier-to-use data in real-time, which used to take up to seven days to compile.
Our team provided effective capacity planning, ensuring the timely and cost-effective delivery of quality care by the right number of workers with the appropriate set of skills. We improved budget and operational monitoring, including established home care quality measures reports and automated waiver quality reports. We also used electronic health records with predictive analytics algorithms to help identify long-term care residents who are at a high risk of harmful falls.
This work supported the acquisition of an additional $10+ million for protective services for elders. Bottomline—these cost-and time-savings are reinvested into the elder affairs office’s services and clients so that they can better provide critical support to elders more efficiently and effectively.
1https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-facility-residents/
2https://www.ahcancal.org/Assisted-Living/Facts-and-Figures/Pages/default.aspx
3https://www.ahcancal.org/News-and-Communications/Press-Releases/Pages/Historic-Staffing-Shortages-Continue-To-Force-Nursing-Homes-To-Limit-New-Admissions,-Creating-Bottlenecks-at-Hospitals-and-.aspx