Triad Senior Living to Deploy Voice-Assisted Care Across Its 10 Facilities

Triad Senior Living today announced plans to deploy AccuNurse voice-assisted care from Vocollect Healthcare in all 10 of its skilled nursing facilities throughout Georgia -- comprising nearly 1,500 employees -- and any future facilities it acquires under its growth strategy.

Triad Senior Living expects the investment in voice-assisted care to take quality of care to new levels of performance by enabling more proactive care, increasing productivity of its direct care team and providing more time for direct resident care. By giving caregivers the capability to access resident care needs on-demand, complete paperwork simply by talking, enhance care-team collaboration with Silent Paging, and respond faster to resident needs, Triad Senior Living expects to achieve numerous performance and reimbursement gains, including enabling higher levels of staff efficiency while increasing quality, eliminating paperwork, and achieving compliance.

According to Ronald M. Herbert, Jr., chief operating officer of Triad Senior Living, the decision to implement AccuNurse voice-assisted care begins with the residents. "Voice-assisted care streamlines care in a highly complex environment. It will enable our staff to work smarter by documenting as they go -- freeing up more time to spend with our residents. Our team is excited about moving away from the limitations of pen and paper to the most advanced technology available: voice. It will enable us to better capture what it is we do best and be paid for it. It will also help us with the annual survey process; and most importantly, empower our team with state-of-the-art systems geared toward quality resident care. That's a huge win not only for our facility and our employees, but also for our residents and their families, who are always our top priority."

AccuNurse voice-assisted care enables the following processes:

• real-time access to information and other staff;
  
• the elimination of paper-based printouts for managing care needs and documentation; and
  
• the ability for caregivers to make decisions more accurately and quickly; and, the ability for the care team to multitask while documenting care, thereby improving productivity and directing more time back to residents.

Prior to its decision to implement voice-assisted care, Triad Senior Living also investigated touch screen systems, but realized they did not completely meet the goals of its facilities. "The touch screen solution did not completely meet our goal for providing care in real-time," explained Herbert. "We felt that our staff would still have to go somewhere to document -- perhaps not to a binder, but to a specific location to input data. With voice, they are documenting while multitasking and will not have to go to a designated place. They can retrieve care needs and document from anywhere in the facility, and at anytime. And they can page each other for help. We anticipate this will also enable our care team to finish their day in a more productive and efficient manner. We also like the fact that voice will provide proactive alerts to our care team -- for incidents such as weight loss, falls, etc. We'll have this information right at our fingertips without having to sift through four or five binders. Our team is very excited about voice and is more than ready to get started with the implementation."

According to James Quasey, president of Vocollect Healthcare Systems, "Voice-assisted care provides Triad Senior Living with assurances on two levels -- first to its care team, in helping them more efficiently know what each and every resident requires with regard to care; and also to the management team, in helping them track progress and trends with regard to the levels of care provided to residents."