Senior Living Communities Find New Benefits in Adopting Electronic Records

Transitioning to electronic systems is proving to be a boon for senior living communities, reports Health Data Management . For example, Senior Housing Companies' Joy Laudick saw a lack of standardization and manual paper processing as hindrances when she became the company's director of clinical management. "We wanted to have a single electronic health record along with revenue cycle management and customer relationship management software," she notes. The organization ultimately opted for the PointClickCare EHR, which features revenue cycle management and CRM software to help support senior living operations. "Moving from paper to electronic is a huge system change for nurses," Laudick says. "We knew we had to have a lot of handholding, assess each community, and then help them go live." Younger nurses had less difficulty adjusting to the change, while older nurses eventually grew to understand that automated information systems let them spend more time with residents and less time on paperwork. Senior Housing's EHR software also is improving senior incident reportage to the Iowa Department of Public Health. Previously when an incident occurred, a nurse would read a report to Laudick, and Laudick would seek more information to determine if the incident was reportable; now, EHR data that includes information on state reporting criteria is used to evaluate if a report should be disclosed to state agencies.