Consistent, Quality Care With Nursing Advantage

Overview

Lifespace Communities, a nonprofit group of Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) with over 45 years of experience delivering care to its residents, recognized an opportunity to create consistent nursing documentation across its network of communities. With 17 communities spread across seven states, inconsistent nursing documentation made it challenging to monitor the quality of care at each location.

Lifespace turned to PointClickCare’s Nursing Advantage solution to support their nurses with best-practice, diagnosis-based assessments which thoroughly evaluate each resident’s condition and help nurses proactively react to resident changes.

Lifespace is now able to track this consistent, comprehensive documentation data in monthly meetings, helping them identify and prioritize areas for improvement in care delivery. Additionally, Lifespace found Nursing Advantage has saved them hundreds of combined hours that would have otherwise been spent working to update their evaluations each time federal regulations changes occured.

How PointClickCare Helped Us

Lifespace chose Nursing Advantage because its dynamic, diagnosis-based assessments provide deep clinical insights for consistent, process-based care and documentation. Nursing Advantage is also continuously updated to reflect changes in federal regulations, allowing Lifespace to reclaim administrative time that would have otherwise been spent addressing necessary updates.

Following implementation, “Our quality measures and rehospitalization rates while utilizing Nursing Advantage, as well as our best practices, have shown a significant improvement, both with positive resident outcomes and experiences,” says Angela Marino Ortiz, Regional Director of Health and Clinical Services at Lifespace.

She notes, “With Nursing Advantage assessments being standardized, it gives me the additional tools and resources to look at those specific areas that could impact our resident outcomes.”

The consistency and insights provided by Nursing Advantage helped Lifespace achieve a 15% increase in Five-Star Quality ratings across their communities, and a 26% decrease in hospitalization rates. Ortiz sees that as the most valuable impact of Nursing Advantage. “Early detection of resident declines allows our nurses to communicate with physicians to implement immediate next steps that mitigate further risk of the resident declining or going to the hospital,” she says.

Furthermore, these outcomes equal improved resident satisfaction and referrals. “We want to make sure that we are providing the best care that we possibly can. When you start sending residents out to the hospital for every little change in condition, it’s traumatic to those residents,” Ortiz explains. “We are recognized by our hospitals for that as well,” she says of their low hospitalization rate. “There are several hospitals where we are their first choice to send patients.”

How it Works

Lifespace uses Nursing Advantage’s consistent nursing documentation to understand what priorities should be targeted across their communities to improve care. The nursing process is supported by best-practice interventions for nurses to implement in response to resident changes.

Nursing Advantage’s guided, evidence-based nursing assessments maintain consistent documentation across Lifespace’s 17 communities, ensuring that documentation meets current federal regulations. The time spent updating assessments to meet standards is reclaimed for communicating important feedback and practice changes to nursing leadership, senior leaders, and stakeholders. “This just pulls everything together,” Ortiz shared. “I feel really bad for providers that don’t have Nursing Advantage, because I know how much work is involved without it.”

Learn More

If you’ve learned about Lifespace’s outcomes with Nursing Advantage and would like to achieve the same success for your organization, contact our team to discuss how a comprehensive approach to improved nursing documentation and clinical guidance can benefit you.