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Barriers to measuring care gaps
A large, multistate senior living operator was recovering from pandemic-related challenges and needed to operate its communities more sustainably. With a legacy EHR system in place, it was impossible to capture and access up-to-date data on resident acuity and related care needs.
The operator was concerned that a significant gap existed between the care rendered vs the care documented and assessed — resulting in potential issues with compliance, family expectations, staff scheduling, and billing. But key data around resident care, such as assessments, incidents and care logs, were siloed, sometimes in paper records, and difficult to gather and analyze portfolio-wide.
The situation was intensified by an increasingly competitive staffing market, rising wages, and significant turnover. NOI was suffering, and accurate care needs data was essential for enabling sustainable operations, paying competitive staff wages, and improving staff retention.
A seamless reassessment experience
Working with the August Health implementation team, the operator decided to reassess every resident across the portfolio to establish a consistent, up-to-date baseline.
Staff relied on August Health’s intuitive, easy-to-use assessment tool that significantly sped up the time to perform assessments and chart care. August Health’s compliance engine proactively surfaced upcoming and past-due assessment notifications, enabling staff to stay on-top of trends.
With a standardized, easy-to-use assessment, the operator was able to reassess 100% of its residents in less than six months, across dozens of communities.
Critical insights for identifying underassessment trends
Following its reassessment initiative, the operator’s leadership team immediately gained real-time access to consistent, comprehensive resident care needs data across their entire portfolio. “We suddenly had all the data we needed at our fingertips,” noted one member of the operator’s leadership team.
Working with the data science team at August Health, the company’s leadership was able to accurately compare acuity across communities, cross-referencing resident needs against staffing and incident levels to identify outliers. Critically - they identified between $20,000 and $50,000 per community per month in previously untracked care needs.
Through the reassessment and ensuing analysis, the operator was able to confirm that resident acuity and related care needs had changed in many communities, allowing the operator to address related challenges in billing and staffing. The overall initiative resulted in higher quality care for residents, reduced liability for the community and more accurate staffing levels across the portfolio.
The path forward
With standardized assessments and accurate and accessible care needs data, the operator faces less risk exposure and is better positioned to cover staffing costs, attract the best staff through competitive wages, and ensure consistent, high-quality care experiences for residents.
“Without August Health, our recovery from the pandemic would have taken far longer. We would have neither identified nor solved our care needs data gaps as quickly,” said the leadership team member. “By providing the critical insights and useful tools we needed, August Health has helped ensure we are on track for long-term stability and growth.”
