3 ways technology is improving nursing home care

3 ways technology is improving nursing home care

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SALT LAKE CITY — Health care technology has received much attention and funding in recent years.

Among its many benefits, technology is having a positive impact on the world of skilled nursing. As concerns over the quality of care in nursing homes has grown rapidly in recent years and increased scrutiny has turned up the heat on administrators, these recent improvements to the industry come at an opportune time.

Health care professionals across the country are building and utilizing technology that can create a better environment for the patient, increase safety and security, and make administrative and skilled nursing tasks more efficient and effective.

Photo: Alexander Raths/Shutterstock
Photo: Alexander Raths/Shutterstock

Three specific modern innovations are improving the quality of nursing homes in different ways: Bestnursinghomes.com offers more efficient tools for consumers to locate highly ranked nursing homes; SNFQAPI.com is an online solution for skilled nursing facilities to increase quality and compliance; and HIPAA-compliant technology can eliminate data and service gaps.

Helping patients find the best care

Every year, Medicare spends millions of dollars conducting unannounced surveys on each of the 16,500 skilled nursing facilities in the country. Skilled nursing facilities are graded on quality measures, staffing level and health inspections. They are given a score between one and five stars based on the results of the survey.

However, the general public remains largely unaware that nursing homes are graded with such a high level of scrutiny and that the level of quality can vary widely from facility to facility. Bestnursinghomes.com aims to take the guesswork out of the process by promoting only the highest-ranked facilities.

Patients and family members on bestnursinghomes.com can search for five-star skilled nursing facilities across the country by name, city, state and zip code. They may also connect with a live-chat specialist instantly to answer any questions about best practices in skilled nursing, how the admissions process works or what amenities each skilled nursing location offers. A provider dashboard is also available for skilled nursing facilities to evaluate analytics for online reviews, live-chat inquiries, compliance analytics and call-tracking.

Quality assurance

The quality of a skilled nursing facility is measured by its ability to meet federal guidelines for quality measures, staffing and health inspections. This can be a daunting task for any group of health care professionals, no matter how long they've been in the business. Thanks to recent advancements in industry technology, however, receiving a zero-deficiency survey (Medicare's highest score) is becoming easier to achieve.

SNFQAPI.com is a new technology that helps facility staff improve the quality of care they deliver every day by providing a better understanding of the federal regulations that guide them. The online application can be accessed on any computer, smartphone, iPad or other wireless device and identifies residents that pose the greatest risk for readmission to the acute hospital by analyzing electronic medical records.

The program assigns indicators to facility staff to determine compliance with all 563 federal regulations and writes a plan of correction for any deficiency found while producing analytics that calculate length of stay, readmissions, regulatory compliance, trends, customer satisfaction scores and more. Ninety-eight percent of SNFQAPI.com customers proudly displayed five stars on www.medicare.gov Nursing Home Compare in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Elimination of health data gaps

As the health care sector moves from a fee-for-service model to a fee based on quality measures, health care providers are becoming increasingly aware of gaps in their patients' care. These gaps can be data gaps, which means a service was provided but not recorded in the health record, or they can be service gaps, which means the service was never performed for the patient.

Meaningful Use and PQRS Medicare penalties for noncompliance will range from 1 percent to 6 percent, as the United States Department of Health and Human Services plans to tie 90 percent of all Medicare payments to "value" by 2018.

Companies like Advantmed serve patients and providers by reviewing a patient's record, finding the gaps preventing the provider from receiving a high-quality score, and offering solutions to fill either the data or service gap. This results in better value for the patient and increased compliance for the provider.

By increasing communication about the quality of nursing homes, improving compliance, eliminating data and service gaps, innovators like those at bestnursinghomes.com, SNQAPI and Advantmed are addressing the problems facing nursing homes in different and effective ways. Along the way, they are creating more than simply technical solutions — they are moving the skilled nursing industry forward toward increased quality and better patient care.


Amy Osmond Cook, Ph.D., is the director of provider relations at North American Health Care. For more information, please visit healthyliving.care or nahci.com.

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