Scheduled Therapy:

• Your therapist starts the day with a list of residents scheduled for care and heads down the hall to find Joe. He is not in his room. Joe’s roommate says he is in the shower. The therapist heads to the shower to get an eta on Joe. He does not find Joe and heads back to Joe’s room. Upon arrival at Joe’s room, the CNA shares that this is Joe’s breakfast time. The therapist heads for Joe’s dining room. Once there, he discovers that Joe likes breakfast in the central dining room and sets off to find him there. On his way to the central dining room, the therapist runs into a family member of another resident with a quick question. Upon arriving in the central dining room, Joe’s breakfast buddies report that he went with another resident to see recent pictures of her grandchildren. By this time, the therapist has exhausted nearly 30 minutes of Joe’s therapy time and must move on to the second appointment for the day. With Real-time Locator, the therapist is able to locate Joe at the beginning of his time slot and optimize the time on the schedule for Joe’s therapy.
  

Mildred, a new resident, loved to walk in her garden in the morning at her home.After moving to her new care facility, she often gets lost as she wanders, trying to find her garden, and becomes confused and frightened.With Real-time Wander Management, Mildred’s caregivers can be notified when she enters an area in the facility that is outside of her normal routine. Staff can easily locate Mildred and redirect her to the gardens, relieving her stress and increasing her safety and comfort.

 

Alice is a resident who loves to socialize. She cruises around in her wheelchair most of the day. Unfortunately, Alice does not always know her own limitations and can wheel into dangerous areas. Real-time Wander Management can establish safety zones specific to Alice that will proactively notify the staff that Alice is getting too close to a stairwell so that her caregivers have the opportunity to intervene before she takes a fall. The visibility into Alice’s whereabouts and her proximity to her danger zones will bring great peace of mind to her caregiver team while allowing them to continue providing assigned care to the other residents.

The resident that wants to elope will elope. Resident safety is at risk when the rare moments when elopement prevention plans and policies lapse. A staff member needs to unload a delivery and they find themselves without assistance. The policy is clear that at no time will doors be left open. In this circumstance, for this 8:06am Tuesday delivery, the staff member props open the door so they can easily unload the supplies into the facility. In just this moment, Clarence passes by and is out the door and out on the street before anyone has a chance to notice. Wait, the door alarm has been sounding throughout the facility the entire time the shipment is being unloaded. Why is no one responding? These constant audible door alarms have caused notification fatigue with the staff. While some may not even notice the door alarm, those that do notice are thinking, “There’s the alarm, yup, it’s 8:06am on Tuesday.” Staff believes it’s a false alarm and that it will stop shortly. To make things worse, no one knows that Clarence is missing, or that for certain that he exited the facility, or Clarence’s location.

Real-time Elopement Mitigation can solve these issues and help protect your resident, staff, and organization from a traumatic story. With Real-time Elopement Mitigation, notifications will be sent to designated staff, warning them that a resident is headed for an exit. This warning will notify the staff before the resident reaches the exit. The staff is alerted of the specific resident’s exit location.

Elopement Definition and Facts.

Elopement is defined by the National Institute for Elopement Prevention as “When a patient or resident who is cognitively, physically, mentally, emotionally and/or chemically impaired wanders away, walks away, runs away, escapes or otherwise leaves a care-giving facility or environment unsupervised, unnoticed and/or prior to their scheduled discharge.”

FACTS: Patient or resident elopement is a dangerous and sometimes deadly situation. Elopement is a word that can strike fear into the heart of every older adult care community and caregivers. Thorough elopement prevention and response plans and policies are established. Education is essential for dealing with elopement and the dedicated staff is copiously trained. Current security technology is deployed, including facility wide audible alarms on all locked exits. Even hearing of elopements can undermine confidence. Experiencing an elopement is traumatizing for the resident, their loved ones and staff. The financial impact is significant, with $400,000+ per average settlement.

The staff believes he has not exited the building because they have not been notified by the resident monitoring technology of an exit. Jane is the designated elopement lead. She begins a forensic review of the camera footage to establish George’s last known location. Per the elopement protocol, the balance of the elopement team begins to systematically search the facility. In the meantime, other residents are now possibly at a higher risk for unsafe wandering and elopement themselves. Jane discovered that George left through an open door in the rear of the building with a delivery driver. This explains why the staff was not notified of his exit. Elopement is confirmed, but there is no confirmation of the direction he headed. In fact, George had re-entered the building through the front door undetected and is visiting with friends in the lobby. While all are grateful that George is safe, staff is stressed by concern for George’s safety, and valuable staff time has been spent escalating through traditional elopement protocols.

• Real-time Management Tools will optimize staff responsiveness to George’s unsafe wandering by locating where he exited in real time and also sending a notification when George returns to a safe area. Should this pattern of wandering continue, the staff can choose to update George’s specific settings so that they receive notification that he is approaching his favorite exit, allowing them to intervene and redirect George before he elopes.
• What if you could bring visibility to traffic patterns and workflow?
• As cited by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), most care facilities nationwide do not have sufficient staff to provide the preferred care to their residents. With this reality, optimized staff utilization and management become mission critical. Most management relies on historical data for analysis and planning. This historical data and planning can’t proactively adjust to the daily changes the management may be faced with due to staff shortages. What would real-time visibility into staff traffic patterns mean to operational efficiencies across multiple functions?
• The facility is already short staffed. It is flu season and there are reports from all departments of absent staff. Imagine being able to visualize staff in real-time and, analyzing care needs, redeploy the staff to improve utilization, ensure all critical tasks are covered and the best possible care is delivered. Real-Time Management Tools equips facilities management with real-time information for mission-critical staffing management.
• Data indicates that there are many costs associated with turnover, including increased hospital readmission rates, high employee replacement costs, loss of productivity, poorer quality of care, a decrease in staff and resident morale, increased work stress, job dissatisfaction, increased accident and absenteeism rates, increased overtime costs, and resident and family dissatisfaction. Real-time Management Tools equips caregivers with information to help improve quality of care, improve safety, build trust, gain efficiency and reduce stress.

• Mabel loves to be outdoors and often spends her afternoons in on the porch watching the birds. Mabel is often unaware of her environment and will sometimes stay outside in unsafe conditions. Mabel’s family and the care facility staff want Mabel to have the option to spend time outdoors as this greatly enhances her quality of her life. On this day, due to low staff levels and the pressures of an upcoming audit, Mabel’s caregivers are consumed with extra duties. Also on this day, the weather has taken a turn and there has been a significant drop in temperature as a cold front moves in. Mabel remains outside, oblivious to the conditions. As evening approaches, the staff notices she is not present for dinner. The porch is the first place they go, where they find her shivering and drenched by the rain. No one knows for sure how long she has been out there. A Real-time Possibility we are currently exploring is to send a caregiver a notification when there is a sudden drop in air temperature. Imagine what it would be like to allow residents the dignity, freedom and health benefits of spending time outdoors while keeping them safe.
• Social worker Tami is facing another discussion with the Johnson family about Grandma’s memory impairment and her need to move from assisted living for her safety and family concerns. The Johnson’s love Grandma, however her current older adult living costs are already at the maximum of their financial abilities, and a move to memory care is unsustainable by the family. We know from our experience in working with older adult care facilities that implementing BHT’s Real-time Location Service will help keep overall costs down, thus extending the length of time that residents can remain at a lower cost of care facility.

BrainHealth Technologies is a service company designing older adult care innovations, pushing the boundaries of existing technologies to develop continually evolving state-of-the-art real-time services. Through our partnerships with global technology, sales leaders, patent holders and manufactures, BHT ensures that the latest advancements in IoT are available to fuel limitless opportunities in the advancement of older adult care management.

BHT/RTLS is differentiated by real-time location and zonal notification capabilities. When, and to which staff member(s) the notifications are sent are determined and adjustable by the facility’s policies and procedures. . Early warning notifications and alerts can be enacted based on zones and individual resident policies. BHT/Real-time early warning notification is what moves your safety care from reactive to proactive and effectively mitigate unsafe wandering and elopement. NOTE: This early warning notification will limit the number of staff required to respond.