As the baby boomers age, there is a growing demand for more senior assisted living facilities and communities across the nation. In some areas, building the housing is not the problem; it’s finding the staff to care for this aging population. In the growing senior care market, turnover rates can be staggering, with some organizations showing a 40 to 75% turnover rate. This is a huge expense in just the hiring and training of new employees, while healthcare costs remain the same. In order to solve this problem, healthcare facilities are turning more to technology, including automation, to improve efficiencies and decrease employee burnout.

Symtech Solutions offers the best communication systems for healthcare facilities around the world, including for rapid response monitoring. We’ve been offering nurse call systems, infant protection systems, and wandering management tools since 1982. We’ve continued to evolve and change with the times and leverage technology to offer more tools, such as digital whiteboards and Mimo Touch-free Temperature Screening Kiosks, to streamline your facility’s processes, increase efficiencies, and improve patient care and satisfaction ratings. Below, we’ll take a look at how incorporating technology into your assisted living facility, long-term care facility, nursing home, and more can help solve the work shortage in senior care. Contact our staff to learn more today!

USING TECHNOLOGY TO SOLVE THE WORK SHORTAGE IN SENIOR CARE

Making Your Staff’s Jobs Easier

No one really likes paperwork. It just makes doing the actual job that much harder. From police officers who now when they interact with people have to file a report to nurses who have to record their interactions with patients, it makes the actual job of protecting people for law enforcement and providing care for seniors that much harder and draining. Let’s face it, paperwork is monotonous and boring, and in the end, care suffers. It often leads to high turnover rates, as staff look to find a position that is more rewarding and more worth their time.

When you implement technology in the workforce that will automate many of these tasks, employee satisfaction rises, as does patient care. Instead of pushing buttons when you enter a patient’s room to turn on and off the nurse call alerts, technology will automatically do this for you. Instead of recording who you interacted with and for how long, RFID technology will record who entered the room and for how long. While these may seem like small tasks, when done repeatedly in a day for dozens of patients, it adds up to hours of wasted time.

Virtual teleconferencing tools are making the healthcare industry’s job easier as well. From making telehealth appointments between healthcare providers and patients to allowing teleconferencing technology into patients’ rooms so they can speak to friends and family, these tools save time, offer safety and security to the provider and the patient, and help keep the spirits up of seniors who often face loneliness in assisted living facilities. This, in turn, leads to less nurse calls from seniors who really have no medical problem, but instead have a mental health problem they wish to solve by chatting to the nurse.

Remote Patient Monitoring

When you go to the doctor’s office, what’s the first thing they do? They check your pulse, your blood pressure, and your heart rate or breathing. They check your vitals. Vitals can now be automatically collected as well, eliminating minutes from a nurse’s day for each patient seen. These vitals are then entered into a system automatically, eliminating that step as well. Sensors can now be worn by patients that will monitor their safety, security, health, and well-being as well, from alerting if a fall has taken place to allowing patients to use their voices to call for help. 

One of the best parts of these sensors is that all of this data is automatically recorded, which serves three functions. One, it helps in liability issues, and two, it is vital in monitoring the level of patient care. The third function is that this data can be analyzed to see any deviation in behavior or activity on the part of the patient, which is important since certain health issues have warning signs ahead of time before they present themselves.

Wandering management tools have been in effect for years. These traditionally work by patients wearing wristbands that are connected to sensors placed strategically around a healthcare facility’s perimeter. When the person wanders beyond these sensors, an alarm is sounded so that the appropriate staff can respond. Recent technology has taken this a step further to adding in motion sensors so staff now knows if someone has been in bed for too long or in the bathroom for an exorbitant amount of time.

Every day new tools come out that can be integrated into existing platforms that can help streamline services and improve patient care. One area that is improving rapidly is making things easier for the seniors themselves to do that can eliminate little things that nurses had to do. For instance, having them choose their meals from a touchscreen or giving them access to an activity calendar. By having nurses focus primarily on medical issue calls rather than lifestyle calls, employee satisfaction goes up, as well as improved healthcare and patient care.

How Symtech Solutions Can Help

Symtech Solutions offers Jeron Provider 790, which is a technology-savvy nurse call system with many time-saving functions. It allows for wireless alerting and communications, real time staff locating, smart bed integration, activity logging and reporting, and workflow solutions. Alerts can go directly to staff’s pagers, so no call goes unanswered when other nurses are busy. By having the same nurse help in a similar area, less time is wasted in transition. Staff members can be found and alerted easily as well.

Not only can motion sensors detect falls, but Provider 790 allows direct communication to patients to remind them to wait for caregivers. These bed exit alarm sensors also alert caregivers so they can respond before a fall occurs.

Patient rounding is automated with Provider 790 as well. Touchscreen pads are easy for caregivers to acknowledge, and those that are busy allow other caregivers to be notified so there is no undue delay in rounding.

Provider 790 is easy to install, maintain, and configure. It is not connected to the internet, which eliminates that worry. Instead, it has an embedded architecture that allows for PCs and servers to be bypassed. This makes it immune to virus attacks, crashes, or reboots. Updates are included with your service, and remote sensing and programming management can be addressed quickly.

HOW SYMTECH SOLUTIONS CAN HELP DECREASE NURSE TURNOVER WITH INCREASED STREAMLINED WORKFLOW

Technology does not have to be scary; once learned, it will make everyone’s life easier. Symtech Solutions has worked diligently since 1982 to provide the best comprehensive and integrated healthcare systems to improve patient care and staff satisfaction. By taking out some of the tediousness of the job that is mainly due to compliance regulations and liability reasons, we help keep employees happy and satisfied with their jobs. Caring for others is hard in and of itself. By eliminating the headaches of compliance and automating it, you can be freer to offer better patient care and spend more time caring for others like you want to do. Our systems help to eliminate alarm fatigue and prioritize the calls that are of critical concern.

Symtech Solutions offers a variety of rapid response monitoring services to meet these ever-changing times. We offer advanced nurse call systems, wander management and infant security, and digital whiteboards to streamline communication. We offer wearable panic buttons and centralized reporting to integrate all of your data into one place for analysis. From electronic wayfinding kiosks to help direct visitors to intelligent patient TV, our systems aim to make everyone’s lives easier.

We offer free webinars for those interested in our systems to learn more and see how they work. Visit us online to sign up today!