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Healthcare providers are increasingly willing to embrace new techniques and systems, such as Activity Monitoring, so that nurses can provide better personalized care to residents and be more efficient with their time. At least, that is the guiding principle. In practice, however, it appears that when new healthcare technology is considered, looking at the bottom line, it is not always regarded as profitable.
What's going wrong? How can we ensure that new technology does add value?
1. Translate vision and strategy into technology
When implementing new care home technology, the focus is often put on the technical application, rather than resident privacy and dignity. There is nothing wrong with this approach in principle, provided it aligns with the strategy of the organization.
In practice, however, it’s often the case that managers and care providers can quickly lose sight of this focus when they consider all the technical possibilities of such a system.
For example, it’s common for healthcare providers to prefer to exclude as many risks as possible which effectively leads to activating all possible alarms within a system. However, too many alarms within the facility means that caregivers spend too much time responding to every alert, even though the matter might not require urgent attention. This alarm fatigue is seriously affecting the quality of life at work for caregivers. The sector is already struggling to recruit enough people, and the demands of the work mean that staff turnover remains high. The introduction of technology into long term care homes has provided the opportunity to reduce risk to residents, but at the same time, the technology itself has become a problem to those providing care.
There must be a way to better manage technology, without impacting resident care?
When implementing a new system, a clear framework is automatically created when the vision of an organization is put first. The vision should therefore encompass all parameters: the safety and well-being of residents, quality of working life and improved efficiency for caregivers, as well as ease of technical implementation and improvement of the solution over time.
This approach results in healthcare professionals’ ability to independently make decisions and plan actions, taking into account relevant laws and regulations, such as those concerning care and coercion.
2. Consider the situation at an individual level
No matter how advanced a system is, one set standard never fully meets the needs and wishes of every resident. To use a care home automation system effectively, it must be tailored to each resident.
Various measures and alerts built into a care home automation system on the one hand limit the freedom of a resident, but, on the other, they can increase safety.
The optimal balance between these two aspects is different for every resident.
Zohre continues: “We naturally strive for the highest possible degree of freedom if it is safe for a resident. Sometimes certain necessary measures, such as an ‘out of bed’ alarm for a resident who is at risk of falling, have to be put in place. It is possible to reduce the measures to a bare minimum, which appears to work well in practice. For example, at one organization an ‘out of bed alarm’ was set at night for a resident who was at risk of falling. This measure had the adverse effect of a caregiver having to be in the room every time the resident had to go to the toilet, even when there were no other identified risks.
This led to an unnecessary invasion of the resident's privacy, as well as being an avoidable task for the care provider.
As a solution, the system was reset, so that an alarm was only going off relating to this resident if this individual didn’t return to bed after ten minutes. As a care provider (and for the resident's family), it’s a case of learning to prioritize and individualize alarm settings”.
This approach can truly transform the way caregivers carry out their work. It allows them to develop a much more personalized approach to each resident’s care, allowing them to spend more time with those that need the most care, whilst providing reassurance for those residents who have less demanding needs.
When a caregiver enters a resident's room with every alarm activated, it can seriously affect prioritization of that individual’s care. An alert management system including smart sensors and predictive monitoring must always be used in such a way that it meets with an organization's vision to put quality of care first.
3. Adjust the way of working
When working with care home automation systems, it is important for care professionals to learn to rely on this technology to support them in delivering certain care activities.
For example, the use of smart sensors in combination with an activity monitoring solution, enables care staff to carry out night checks on residents.
The introduction of new healthcare technology requires a different way of working, which is another reason why its implementation goes much further than simply applying technical gadgets to existing processes. The technology fundamentally affects all aspects within an organization.
“A home care automation system is not something that can coexist with an established way of doing things, introduced alongside a familiar way of working. A new technology solution has tangible impacts on all care tasks that caregivers undertake. That’s why I always say: “It is about organizational transformation, rather than a technical change.”
Zohre Ghorbanzadeh, Global Segment Marketing Manager
Of course, the details of implementations are still generally approached from a technical perspective. This methodological approach is precisely why Ascom consultants work closely with providers, so that care home staff are much more involved in the whole process, which, in turn, builds more support for our technology within the organization.
Care home staff realize that the technology system is an essential part of the care they provide. This way, the care home automation system becomes embedded into the care and vision of that organization.
Organizations start asking vital questions, such as:
• How do we want to deal with resident clients?
• What does each specific resident need?
• How do we want to improve our workflow and caregivers' workload
• How do we translate these needs into our systems?
The vision and the process of each care home is central to a successful implementation. The one-sided message: “Here you have a new system, and all this is possible,” is put aside.
Fortunately, a growing number of organizations are realizing that the success of their systems is determined by the extent to which they are supported by the staff who use them, especially when these staff have been brought on board early enough in the change process to co-create a new way of working.
Find out more about our long-term care solutions here.