New Technology and Long Term Care
By jana on Feb 8, 2008 in Long Term Care, Technology and LTC
In an earlier post I asked: Is Quality Home Care Affordable? and one of the things that I mentioned needing improvement was technology. Apparently that doesn’t stop with home care…
A Long Term Care facility in Ontario, Canada announced that their productivity has increased by 25% by using a new location technology by Intelligent InSites. Basically, this system has “small pendants, equipment tags, and location monitoring sensors installed throughout the facility” which allows for quick identification of where staff, caregivers and much needed equipment is at any given moment.
This system is a necessity in every Long Term Care facility and I don’t mean from an efficiency standpoint. At a certain point it becomes about the level of care you can give to the residents. If a lift is needed in a room because a bedridden resident needs to use the bathroom, then the staff should be able to know where the lift is, whether or not it is in use and when it can be brought to the resident’s room. Instead, long term care facility staff sometimes take hours looking for that particular piece of equipment and getting it to the resident. Time lost and discomfort for their resident.
I recently spent some time at Northwestern’s Prentice Women’s Hospital and was extremely impressed with the technology there. Besides the Internet access in every room, flat screen tvs, state of the art medical equipment, all the nurses wore wireless units where if they are paged directly by their patients, they have the ability to talk to them no matter where they were on the floor. If I were to page my nurse, she could answer me directly and assess the urgency of my need , answer my need over the speaker or let me know how long it would take her to get to my room. Something as small as this helps the efficiency of the nurses and increases the comfort level of the patients. Something that could greatly increase the quality of nursing home care.
One of the best features of the Intelligent InSites technology are the pendants worn by residents where they can press a button and the “staff is immediately alerted to the name, photo, and location of the resident making the request.” These pendants also help residents in the Alzheimer’s unit as they can notify staff via a handheld PDA should someone begin to wander off. Intelligent InSites feels that their pendant feature “promote[s] the independence of the residents while ensuring their safety.”
For more information on this story, please see the news release on BusinessWire.
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